Filed under: Audio, iTS, iTunes
Gracenotes and iTunes in lyrics talks
A deal between Apple iTunes and Gracenotes may be in the works according to this recent Reuters report posted by PC Magazine. Gracenotes has gained the rights to legally distribute lyrics from BMG, Universal Music, Sony/ATV and other content providers. A deal between iTunes and Gracenote is a natural evolution of this acquisition, similar to the existing agreement that allows Gracenote to supply iTunes with track information. Gracenotes CEO Craig Palmer expects lyrics to provide up to $100 million in annual revenues by a decade from now. An iTunes deal would create a portion of those revenues.
TUAW recently showed readers how to add lyrics to iPods using iTunes' current features.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Geoff said 5:28PM on 4-24-2007
Gracenote :) Not Gracenotes !
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John said 5:49PM on 4-24-2007
Does anyone proofread or know what they're writing about anymore. Gracenote.
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Leonard Nimrod said 6:19PM on 4-24-2007
This is great an all, but is there a free utility that does an adequat job of automatically adding lyrics for your songs? The only ones I've found require the song to be playing, which my library, would take an awfully long time.
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tkelly said 7:03PM on 4-24-2007
So does that mean searches in iTunes by lyrics? For that song on the radio that you don't know its name!!!!
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John Dough said 7:08PM on 4-24-2007
Looks like Yahoo beat Apple to the punch.
http://music.yahoo.com/lyrics
Personally this is not a killer feature for me but I can see how it may have value for some people.
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G said 8:16PM on 4-24-2007
I always figured lyrics would be a useful way to let people search for music. They hear a song somewhere, recall a few words, and go to work.
But here is where we enter the Twilight Zone. Labels can already add liner notes and lyrics with iTunes Producer, when uploading music to the iTunes Store. Liner notes, however, have never survived past that. The only notes you'll ever see in the store are the ones which Apple licenses (pays for) from All Media Guide. And now they are going to license lyrics from a third party as well? When they are already in their database for free? How.. odd. At least Apple can then hit up AMG when tons of lyrics are missing, because the labels thought Apple was dumping them all this time, and stopped adding them. But then what about the indies? Indies don't have deals with Gracenote.
And it sounds above like the majors have been protecting this like a revenue source, instead of a service to the consumer to help sell music. Or "marketing."
Maybe I just need some caffeine, and I'll come back and read this all properly. Yes. That must be it...
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gary said 8:49PM on 4-24-2007
Well, if there's one typo in this article it has to be the $100 million in lyric revenue by 2017. What on earth could that business model be? It's difficult enough getting everybody to buy music, much less buy lyrics. I doubt Apple would sell more iTunes becuse lyrics were included, so where's the revenue stream here?
Enjoy................G
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jeremy said 9:56PM on 4-24-2007
They said something about this on Engadget last year.
I hope they really go through with this, though. I't such a pain to put in lyrics one's self. Especially when the artist's own page doesn't even have them.
Personally, I think every album in iTunes should require one of those "Digital Booklets" since the iPhone supposedly can view them.
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Mandy said 11:39PM on 4-24-2007
It would be SOO nice to get accurate lyrics hassle free. Now if we can just access these from anywhere anytime, that would be perfect!
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Phil said 2:36AM on 4-25-2007
Wow. Lyrics. Money? Personally, I consider myself a pretty hardcore music lover. 2000+ cds, thousands of songs on my mac, did my own music zine (print, how OG is that?), premium emusic sub...but lyrics, i could care less.
I guess the Britney Spears crowd might be into lyrics, I mean they have to have something to write on their notebooks.
This is totally a non-issue to me. I could care less about the actual lyrics. I have a pretty close guess as to what they are...and short of horribly confusing lyrics to a classic it's more about how I feel when listening to a song. In most cases the vocals end up being the extra instrument.
Personally, I don't see why people would be anal about having the absolute, definitive lyrics to a song. And really, why are you fretting over lyrics while listening...you should be doing something productive like writing clean XHTML while jamming out to Echo and the Bunnymen...not worrying about lyrics.
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AA said 6:29PM on 4-25-2007
Just tried Yahoo!'s lyrics service-it doesn't allow you to copy the lyrics-say into iTunes.
Basically to save the lyrics-you have to drag into a image editor and save it as a JPG.
No text/iTunes suitable version available.
I bet Apple's service will be built-in to iTunes.
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