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.
Founded in 2004, MetroLeap Media Inc. is leading provider of entertainment content within the music Internet market. Its flagship site,... [more]
These guys have been seriously under the radar in Vancouver. Thanks for pointing them out!
Hey guys, Milun here from MetroLeap (co-founder and CTO). We have been under the radar for a while until we worked out all the legalities which took a better part of the three years. We did however attend a few meets including the big one at Science World a few years ago.
We're very proud to be a Vancouver company and I've been an avid reader of techvibes.com for a while now.
Hey Milun - thanks for commenting.
Happy to have uncovered MetroLyrics as you can now give Markus & Plentyoffish a run for his money on the Vancouver Start-up Index!
Rob.
[...] April, Techvibes covered the news when MetroLyrics converted to a legal lyrics only site using Gracenote’s database. Prior to MetroLyrics, Gracenote cut a deal with power houses like [...]
