CANNES, France (Top40 Charts/ Concept Communications) -Gracenote, a global leader in technology and services that are an integral part of the digital media economy, today announced it has expanded its Lyrics program to the European market by initiating licensing discussions with European music publishers and artists. More than 80 publishers have joined the Gracenote Lyrics program since its launch in July 2006, including all five major music publishers in the U.S., resulting in the world's broadest catalog of licensed song lyrics. With its pervasiveness in
Europe and its understanding of the European market, Gracenote is uniquely positioned to be the first to bring the most extensive set of legal, accurate song lyrics to the region.
Gracenote holds the rights to all available lyrics from the North American music catalogues of the five major music publishers: BMG Music Publishing, EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group and Warner/Chappell Music. Independent publishers in the program include Peermusic, Famous Music, ABKCO Music, Inc., The Bob Dylan Music Company, Disney Music Publishing, Ice Nine Publishing, and Windswept Holdings. These licenses pave the way for the first legal mass commercial use of lyrics, which is an important step in enhancing the consumer digital music experience while protecting the rights of songwriters and music publishers around the globe.
Gracenote will launch a lyrics service next month in North America, enabling digital music retailers, mobile providers, search engines, music portals, and consumer electronics manufacturers to offer legal access to an accurate and comprehensive lyrics catalog. With this announcement Gracenote is beginning its licensing of European lyric rights and plans to launch a service in Europe in 2008.
European Localization in Gracenote's Global Media Database
Gracenote's Global Media Database is the world's largest database of music information, accessed by more than 200 million people annually and actively used within every European country. The reason for Gracenote's popularity in Europe stems in part from its focus on localizing the content for individual European countries, including music styles, genres, and support for local languages. More than 600,000 uniquely European albums exist in the Gracenote database, which has been searched more than 100 million times by European consumers.
An element of the Global Media Database, Gracenote's proprietary Global Genre System offers 1600 micro-genres mapped to culturally relevant genres, and contains more than 200 classifications unique to Europe, including local music styles such as Hamppa (Finland), Volkstümliche Musik (Germany), Levenslied (Dutch), Cantautori (Italy), Música Popular Ligera (Portugal), Dhimotiká (Greek), Chalga (Bulgaria) and Grime (U.K.). The combination of localized content and song lyrics will further enhance Gracenote's products and services for European consumers.
'Gracenote has a deep understanding of the European market and is pervasive throughout the continent. For this reason we're uniquely positioned to be the first to bring a lyrics licensing program to the region,' said Craig Palmer, CEO of Gracenote. 'We look forward to forging relationships in the European market as we build compelling new products and services that will deliver lyrics to millions of consumers worldwide.'
'Licensing our catalog of lyrics through Gracenote gives consumers new access to accurate, legal and original content,' said Nicholas Firth, chairman and CEO of BMG Music Publishing. 'Our agreement with Gracenote ensures that music lovers will have the most compelling and complete music experience. This license creates a new revenue stream which will guarantee songwriters are paid for their work.'
As part of the lyrics licensing program, independent publishers and songwriters in Europe are able to 'opt in' via a website and have their Lyrics made available through Gracenote's service. This is a breakthrough in enabling smaller organizations or even individual artists to have their important content made available to millions of fans and to be properly compensated for its use. Music Publishers can go to www.gracenote.com/lyrics for more information and enroll in the program.
