MetroLyrics hits 45 Million pageviews in January 2010
Which music websites are the top three most visited in the world? iTunes? Yahoo! Music? MySpace?
If those were your three guesses (I know they were mine), you’re only two for three; while MySpace and Yahoo! Music are on that list, the top three is rounded out by MetroLyrics, the world’s most popular lyrics website, and the product of a 25-year-old Vancouver man who came to this country as a refugee fleeing the 1995 civil war in Bosnia.
Milun Tesovic turned enthusiasm for computers in high school into a business worth “well past” a million dollars. Tesovic and his business partner Alan Juristovski have told their story before at events, but The Globe and Mail recently published a profile of the two partners, and how they rose to dominate the market on online song lyrics — legally:
When his family moved to Canada, Tesovic knew how to say numbers and colours in English, and some helpful phrases such as “Can I borrow a pencil?” and “Can I go to the bathroom?” He spent a year in ESL.
At 15, he began a user-generated lyrics website, choosing the name MetroLyrics from a domain name spinner. He designed it, programmed it, worked on it at home and in the computer lab at school. He showed it to friends who shared it with their friends. As more users contributed and searched the site, the website started moving up on the search engines. It began looking more like a business and less like a hobby.
You can read the full piece here.
Photo: The Globe and Mail
