Music Publishers sue Lyrics sites
Firstly it’s because it harms the music industry’s “ability to adapt to the changing marketplace” and furthermore “cheats songwriters out of fair compensation for their creative efforts”.
Lets talk about both seperately; the cheating of the songwriters seems clear, they write a songtext and get paid when its used. When someone puts it on a website they don’t get paid for the use, thus they are cheated. But are they? Because everyone that goes to a lyrics site wants to know “the lyrics to that great song I’ve just heared” or whatever makes them come there, we can all agree that the basis for visiting a lyrics website is hearing the song. I might be wrong but by having already heared the song, isn’t it strange to then not allow people to put this text on a website? Clearly the text goes with the music and the combined song is the product that is being sold by the music industry, by allowing people to reread the text are you not setting the stage for having them to listen to the song again? If the music industry is not able to sell songs to people so clearly interested in them they do not understand their business.
Funnily enough, this last sentence is confirmed by the first reason for sueing; “it harms the music industry’s ability to adapt to the changing marketplace”. It does not harm the music industry ability to adept in any way but one. Lets get the first, and only reason, out of the way first. People use Google to look for stuff on the internet; a page’s Google ranking determines how high a site ranks in the results and how many people would use it as their source. For the already released songs, it would be hard for the music industry to get a google ranking higher than the lyric sites because they were here first. Would this harm them in the future? No, because they always know what songs will be released and which’ll probably be a hit, they should be able to very easily top google rankings on their own songs.
I fail to see any other way in which the availability of a song’s lyrics harms the music industry’s ability to adept to the changing marketplace. I only see positive influences;
* The music industry gets a great suggestion towards what could be added value to selling a song online; the song’s lyrics integrated in the file when a song is bought online.
* The music industry gets additional places for distribution; people that look a lyric up would probably like to hear the song again, why not sell it at the site like they do at youtube
* The music industry gets valuable insight into the long tail of music; what kind of songs do people like from times past
The only harm that’s been done is what the music industry is doing to itself. It keeps saying it would like to evolve and adapt to the changing marketplace, but all that it’s been doing is focus on the same old thing; sell a song for as much as possible and keep out any innovation. Being conservative is not going to cut it in the long run, especially not in a moving marketplace with a product of which the core is so easy to reproduce once its out there. Adding value to legitimately bought songs should be their first focus and if that’s not working, stop sueing and start building another way to earn.