The Death Of The Lyric Website – Google signs deal with LyricFind

Are you fed up of encountering Ad heavy, Malware riddled, terribly designed and inaccurate content when you are searching for lyrics to your favourite songs? Yes? Well if you are like me, you will be pleased to know that those days appear to be numbered, as Google as inked a deal with Toronto based LyricFind.

As of today Google’s deal means that the search engine will source & display lyrics from over 4,000 publishers in its search results and within Google Play Music.

If you are in the USA, simply search for the name of your chosen song followed by ‘lyrics’ on Google. The engine will also display a list of alternative results of songs with the same name by other artists. This feature will be rolled out globally over the next few months.

The full details of integration with Google Play Music have not emerged, however potential links to help users quickly purchase the tracks, or click through to read more lyrics within the Play Store seem likely.

This move will mean good things for the artists too, with LyricFind co-founder Darryl Ballantyne saying that he expects the partnership to give rise to “a significant revenue stream.” He noted, “I can’t get into the rates, but we expect it to be millions of dollars generated for publishers and songwriters as a result of this. It’s all based on usage. Royalties are paid based on the number of times a lyric is viewed. The more it’s viewed, the more publishers get paid.”

It won’t however be good reading for the owners of the websites that have generated revenue by displaying lyrics (quite often without permission to do so). Lyric Websites have been the staple of Internet searches for over decades, this will have a dramatic impact on their traffic and they will need to offer users more reasons to visit their websites.