MetroLyrics get Authorized

Vancouver-based MetroLeap Media announced today that they have an signed an agreement with Gracenote to provide their flagship site – MetroLyrics – with Gracenote’s catalog of lyrics. Gracenote is the world’s largest database of licensed song lyrics while MetroLyrics is one of the largest lyrics sites on the Web. MetroLyrics was #1 on our Vancouver Start-up Index for March and claims to be one of the 500 fastest-growing websites in the world with 25 million monthly visitors. Beginning today, hundreds of thousands of authorized song lyrics from all four major and hundreds of independent music publishers will be incorporated into MetroLyrics through the Gracenote service. To date, MetroLyrics has offered a service fueled mainly by community submissions. This partnership with Gracenote will make MetroLyrics one of the first operating lyrics sites to transition to a fully-authorized and licensed service. Through the agreement, MetroLyrics users can now be certain that artists, songwriters and music publishers are being properly compensated for the use of their copyrighted lyrics.

“Gracenote worked with us to fully understand our business model and offered licensing that made sense to our existing lyrics site,” said Alan Juristovski, co-founder and CEO, MetroLeap Media. “Gracenote and MetroLyrics working together will allow faster inclusion of the latest and most frequently-searched songs in the Gracenote’s lyrics database.”

For years song lyrics have been one of the most popular search queries on the Internet (6th most popular on Ask.com in 2007) and because of this hundreds of sites hosting unauthorized lyrics have popped up. Through Gracenote, MetroLyrics is now setting the standard for other lyrics sites by ensure that the most important contributors to the process – the songwriters – get their fair share of the revenue. Smart move MetroLyrics.