Turning Lyrics into a Business: musiXMatch's Next Generation Lyrics API

 Italy. I’m a fan of the innovative Italian rapper for over a decade. Even though he sings in Italian, over time I have come to know most of his lyrics. Not that I know what they all mean, but I know them. At the concert, thousands of us were singing with him at the top of our lungs - lyrics committed to memory through repetition.

Then there are the songs I don’t know, but I THINK I know. When my brother was four, he used to toddle around singing More than a Woman by the Bee Gees – thinking it was Bald Headed Woman. We knew it wasn’t, but it was more entertaining to let him sing it that way.

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When I want to look up lyrics today, I do it rather sloppily. Like most people, I go to Google, type in the band/lyrics and spend the next two hours slogging through the garbage Google dredges up. When I try and find a song on Spotify or iTunes and I can’t remember much about it, I search on key words, genre or lyrics I remember. I usually get the proverbial hand – or ‘try searching again with different terms’. I don’t like it, but I have come to accept this.

“Not many industries in our world have suffered so much disruption yet still exist, as the music industry has,” said Jeff Coe, serial entrepreneur and independent advisor in digital content. “That’s because music can never be superseded or replaced by technology, it’s just the way we consume it that has changed.”

According to Coe, with disruption comes innovation, and the music industry has spawned some of the most innovative technologies currently used. “The music industry and everyone inside of it have been forced to explore all the cracks and corners of the music world to find value for the consumer and clever ways to consume and experience music so that the money wheels keep turning.”

Coe is right. The music industry is a source of constant discussion and continual innovation - Shazam, Spotify, Pandora, Songkick – not to mention the grand daddy of them all,  iTunes sitting on top of the heap with Apple working hard to keep the throne when it comes to music and content.

But, in Bologna, Italy, lies a new music start up who decided that lyrics are where its at in the new music value chain.

musixMatch is taking an unexpected approach to the shifting sands of the online music industry – they are focusing on lyrics. They adamantly say they aren’t a lyrics site, but the largest authorized lyrics catalogue in the world. The key word there is authorized. To date they provide 5.3 million authorized lyrics. They claim they will be the IMDB for music lyrics.

It’s pretty simple. musixMatch has created a powerful Lyrics API that delivers legal lyrics to any kind of music app or service out there.

“Lyrics are not only words, they are a key ingredient to a vast, but often chaotic, music ecosystem that drives traffic,” said Massimo Ciociola, co founder and CEO, musixMatch. “The secret to our success is in licensing data. It’s all about data today which is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of the music industry. musiXMatch's Lyrics API delivers exactly what music site owners need to meet the demands of users and content rights holders.”

Coe believes that by making the access to lyrics and information of rights holders more accessible to the wider industry, a totally new revenue stream can be tapped into and musicians can seek yet again another path to replace any losses from physical media.

If a music site or app or service is using the musiXmatch Lyrics API, users will have access to detailed meta data about the artists – who performed it, genre, influences, related artists, etc.  For the site owner, musiXmatch manages all the digital rights management (DRM) essentially clearing the content for legitimate distribution, authorized by the rights holders.

“In terms of industry copyrights and legalization, we believe we have helped the industry move forward by creating a global distribution model and a simple monetization platform for digital lyrics,” added Ciociola.

Ciociola claims that 10 percent of all Google searches are music related and 70% of those are lyrics related. “In fact, people search more for “lyrics” than they do for “sex”. A lyrics search drives more traffic than any other words on Google.”

It sounds like a nightmare obtaining rights and permission from music publishers for as extensive a listing of lyrics as musixMatch has.  According to Ciociola it was and that was their biggest challenge.

“We started in Q4 2009 and approached all the leading music publishers - Sony, Emi Publishing, Universal Publishing, etc. We told them we wanted to build the largest and most exhaustive Lyrics database in the world, 100% fully authorized by them,” said Ciociola. “It took more than two years of negotiation and conversation to convince them. Now, we are the only ones that have a global licensing deal in place.”

musixMatch recently raised $3.7 million for their lyrics platform from FMA, a private fund managed by Francesco Micheli and Carlo Micheli, previous founders of Fastweb, which is now part of the Swisscom Group. That's a significant amount of funding which means that investers think they are onto something.  They have just opened an office in Silicon Valley largely due to the fact that 95% of their traffic is outside of Italy. They are also looking at locations currently driving new music adoption – US and Japan.

The team is also impressive – a mix of finance, behavorial algorithm, mobile and tech wizards. Five co-founders topped with a secret projects consultant. Their CEO, Massimo Ciocola, founded Wireless Solutions SpA in 2000, which was acquired by the Dada Group in Florence, Italy. He became the CEO of Dada’s Iberia & LATAM units as well as the VP of mobile services for the entire group. Jonny Delli Carri, the COO, ditched years at KMPG and Accenture to steer their financial ship; Giuseppe Costantino, in charge of musixMatch's magic API and the intuitive front-end; Francesco Delfino, the Cool things Evangelist and the founder of Splinder, Italy’s largest bloggers community; Valdez Paolini, runs Metadata & Architecture and is known as THE metaman; and finally their secret projects consultant, Loreto Parisi, who is seriously into behavioral algorithms and adserver technology.

Ciociola and the team are very proud of their roots and insist it doesn’t matter where they are based, despite the pressure to move to Silicon Valley. “Most music startups are based in Europe, Spotify (Sweden), Soundcloud (Germany), Songkick (UK), so we thought why can’t the next big one be Italian?”

But taking this one step further into the future, it’s also about changing online music services like last.fm , Spotify, Soundcloud. The reality is, the game may be changing for them if musiXmatch has their way.

musiXmatch wants to integrate a live "scroll" of lyrics on these sites as a song play so the listener can see the lyrics in real time.

“We want to create positive change in the industry. musiXmatch is listening to all those scrolling sources and matching all those tracks with lyrics. We currently have a 75% success rate matching ratio from everything we listened to and we were able to catch,” added Ciociola. “musiXmatch apps are downloaded more than 10K times every day. Our app on Android works as a lyrics scroller listening to all possible music sources,”

Ciociola added: “We say lyrics are a social music plugin: people add lyrics, correct, share. There’s more traffic around lyrics than on the music download itself.”

Coe agrees with the social aspect: “The most obvious and still virgin areas of consumption for music are those of the social space and that of crowd sourcing with examples such as Turntable.fm allowing people to mix there own radio stations and be rewarded for the amount of users and positive feedback they get.”

"I believe there are still untapped areas of monetization just below the surface that are being unearthed due to ever increasing need and accessibility to music today," adds Coe.

Just remember this: it wasn’t that long ago when Apple just made computers and the last thing anyone would have expected was they would become the big pimp daddy of music and content.  musixMatch is smartly running down a road that will exploit that ecosystem and deliver a new music delivery system and experience.