A Taste of Music Publishing

If you want to get an idea of what music publishing is like--and how it is not like the recording industry--read this NYT article that profiles Martin Bandier, chief executive of music publisher Sony/ATV. The article's accompanying photo may be all you need to see. And this: So it’s come to pass that after decades of playing second fiddle to the much bigger and brighter stars in the industry’s recording business, music publishing is on a roll. It is, as its executives like to say, a business of pennies and nickels, but that small change generates $3 billion in annual revenue, throws off enviably predictable streams of cash and has caught the eye of private equity firms and large institutional investors who are snapping up catalogs of stars like Frank Sinatra and Madonna.

NMPA Sues Motive Force

Motive Force LLC is behind LyricWiki. From an August 27, 2009 article in Ecommerce Journal: "The suit against LyricWiki [by the National Music Publishers Association] also states that the site "knowingly assist[s] and induce[s] third-party software developers to distribute copies of lyrics from Plaintiff's Songs to consumers' computers and personal media player." However, earlier this month [LyricWiki's] Sean Colombo published a letter on the LyricWiki API Developers Google Group telling developers that licensing agreements with big music publishers meant that the company could no longer add programmatic access to LyricWiki's collection."

Music publishers have waited way too long to do this and it'll be the whole RIAA thing all over again. The music publishing business may be bigger profit-wise than the recording business (and after all, before recorded music, publishing was "The Music Industry") so they've got time and resources to seriously entrench on this.

LyricWiki Busts Its API

If you run an application or script which uses LyricWiki to supply lyrics (such as Lyrics Via LyricWiki) you will probably see this message instead of the lyric results you expected:

Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics)...(Please note: this is not the fault of the developer who created this application, but is a restriction imposed by the music publishers themselves.)

I could have guessed this clampdown from publishers was coming.