Gracenote Lyrics™ is the cornerstone of the Gracenote Music Enrichment™ platform, providing music vendors with a simple solution for expanding their end users' experiences. Gracenote Music Enrichment is the only solution that combines industry leading recognition, full-cycle content management, multi-platform support, and a global repository of licensed, rich music content. Music Enrichment delivers contextually relevant data to end users as they are enjoying music. This includes not only lyrics but also artist biographies, artist contemporaries, album cover art, album reviews, and album notes.
Gracenote Lyrics is the world’s first commercially viable lyric offering, providing customers with numerous ways to deploy and monetize the world’s largest database of legal, high-quality lyrics for music fans. Publisher deals supply the rights to use lyrics and data standards, and quality processes create accurate content. A Lyric-specific royalty payment system ensures that songwriters get paid seamlessly.
There are numerous components required to support a legal lyric service. Gracenote has successfully managed the interdependence of music publishing rights, quality content, and technology to pioneer the delivery of lyrics to the digital domain.
Music Publishing Rights
Song lyrics are copyright controlled content and can be used only with permission from music publishers. Gracenote has signed deals with more than 80 music publishers to date, including the "Big 4" which represent over 70% of the global music manufacturing and distribution market.
Music service providers are challenged with building unique and compelling solutions. Building compelling solutions for their end users is challenging. For these end users, Gracenote offers a flexible set of lyric licensing options:
- Downloads
- Streaming
- Subscription
- Ad-Supported Search
- Paid Search
- A-La-Carte
- Embedded CE products
Gracenote has partnered with an experienced rights payment partner to build a Lyric-specific rights clearance and payment system. This system ensures that complex and dynamic publisher and songwriter data is up-to-date and accurate, supports removal of disputed lyrics from the service, and delivers quarterly royalty distributions to songwriters.
Gracenote helped create a new revenue source for songwriters, and is the only company with the rights, deals, and technology in place to launch a commercially viable lyric service.
Quality Lyric Content
Gracenote authored the world’s first comprehensive set of digital lyric quality standards and implemented a custom quality process to ensure that our Lyrics database is consistent and accurate. Gracenote combines customer editorial input, sales figures, digital album lookup statistics, and up-to-date recording industry charts to determine which lyrics to acquire and clear.
In some cases, lyrical content might not be appropriate for all music fans. Gracenote uses customer catalog metadata, custom text investigation code, and editorial input to flag lyrics as “explicit” or "potentially offensive" material.
Getting the right lyrics to music fans means fans will be able to enjoy lyrics from today’s new releases to yesterday’s classics. Identifying specific content within lyric text allows music service vendors to control the display of specific lyrics based on end user profile or demographic.
Technology
Built on top of our industry leading Global Media Database®, MusicID®, and Service™, Gracenote Lyrics™ supports delivery to all major media platforms:
- PC
- Web
- Mobile
- Online Devices
- Embedded Devices
Commercial music catalogs are complex: recordings released on multiple albums, remixes, live versions, and multiple covers. Gracenote combines matching algorithms, identification technology, and rights clearance data to map lyrics accurately to commercial catalog tracks. Mapping the right lyrics to catalog tracks optimizes the revenue opportunity for songwriters while preserving the integrity of the royalty payment chain.
Finding the right lyric, based on key phrases or words from a lyric, requires a search engine that is tuned differently than traditional search engines. Gracenote has built a Lyric search engine on top of its world-class Gracenote Service, delivering fast, relevant results for track lyric-focused searches.
Enabling the right deployment for a wide variety of customers makes Gracenote the clear choice for lyrics. Finding the right lyric helps end users find the tracks they are interested in, supports user retention, and enriches the overall music experience.