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Burnaby lyric service now boasts 23 million monthly online visitors and is among the top-10 most-viewed music and entertainment websites in the U.S. Curt Cherewayko MetroLeap Media Inc. has left behind the “grey market” in which nearly all song lyrics websites operate. Monthly traffic at the Burnaby-based company’s metrolyrics.com flagship website has nearly doubled to more than 23 million visitors since December, the month before it began fairly – not to mention legally – compensating song artists, musicians and publishers. Although song lyrics are copyrighted and can be viewed only on websites with permission from music publishers, many websites that offer unauthorized and frequently inaccurate lyrics have flourished. This included metrolyrics.com, until MetroLeap signed a deal with Gracenote, a California-based digital media firm, to adopt Gracenote’s database of more than 800,000 song lyrics, the world’s largest licensed and accurate lyrics database. “You cannot grow your business based on questionable practices,” said Alan Juristovski, MetroLeap’s CEO.
Each time a metrolyrics.com visitor views a lyric, MetroLeap pays Gracenote to pay royalties to song rights holders. “If suddenly you need to pay somebody $100,000, $200,000 … $5 million in royalties – that’s not compelling to a lot of people,” said Juristovski, noting that the royalty payments are nonetheless necessary to become a legitimate website. Besides, metrolyrics.com’s cost per mile (CPM) – the measurement used to calculate the cost to advertisers to show an ad to 1,000 viewers – has doubled since signing with Gracenote. Juristovski attributed the rise in CPM to demand from businesses that want to advertise on a legitimate lyrics site. “We have advertisers that, in the past, would stay away from lyrics because of the questionable copyright practices.” Metrolyrics.com is among the top-10 most-viewed music and entertainment websites in the U.S., behind such sites as Yahoo! Music and MTV Networks Music, but ahead of MSN Music, Ultimate-Guitar.Com and all other dedicated lyrics sites. It was previously the third most popular dedicated lyrics website in the world, but has risen to the top of the list since signing the deal with Gracenote. Roughly a dozen music and entertainment websites have signed with Gracenote, but metrolyrics.com is the first site entirely dedicated to song lyrics to convert from an illegal database to one that pays royalties to the appropriate copyright holders each time lyrics are viewed. “Lyrics are becoming a product,” said Juristovski, who co-founded MetroLeap with CTO Milun Tesovic in 2004 as the legal entity to operate metrolyrics.com, which went online two years earlier. When Tesovic was 16, he developed script using his own code for a lyrics database that would be the pre-cursor to metrolyrics.com. With only four staff and “several millions” annually in advertising sales from metrolyrics.com, MetroLeap has been profitable since Day 1 and has not had to bring in outside investors. Metrolyrics.com users can still submit lyrics to the site, but each lyric must be cleared by the song publisher to ensure it’s licensed and accurate. Said Juristovski: “Everybody in this business knows that in order to really have something that is sustainable … you need to be on the legal side of business.” •
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