Did you know that a staggering 70% of all searches for music on the Internet are related to lyrics? It seems everyone wants to know if Billy Joe Armstrong really sang about "dead skin on trial" in Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)."
While the CD continues its painful death rattle, and as the recorded music business continues to look for ways to eek out a few bucks in the face of declining sales, overall music consumption -- via Internet, in live settings, through film, television, gaming and commercial integrations -- is bigger than ever, leading people to search out its sources, inspirations and fundamentals, chief among them, lyrics.
Moreover, shows like American Idol and Glee have weaned a new generation of fans on song fundamentals and given rise to a new appreciation of lyrics and melody. All of a sudden, there is great demand for the lyrics product.
Whether you have a song stuck in your head, want to share lyrics on your MySpace page or challenge your friends at "Rock Band," everybody, it seems, has looked up lyrics at one time or another, and the Internet has made access to legal lyrics much more readily available.
Beforehand, fans were just arguing as to whether Hendrix was saying "'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky" or "'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy." Now, problem solved!
And a business born. In fact, HALF of all Internet users visit at least one music site in any given month. Yes, you read that right ... HALF.
How do I know? I'm a supplier. The lyric pusher if you will. Every month, more than 40 million unique users visit our site metrolyrics.com to get the most up to date, accurate, and legal lyrics to hundreds of thousands of songs by artists from every genre of music.
The music industry is waking up to the fact that lyrics are -- and will continue to be -- big business, if we can continue to provide an easy, effective and legal product for the user.
Lyrics are a potential new revenue stream for an industry looking to monetize their product in as many ways as possible -- ringtones, ring tunes, concert tickets and merchandise stakes, etc. I don't claim to be an expert in applied economics, but I can safely say I'm sure any business would like 40 million monthly customers.
And if we play our cards right and work together to spur the curiosity that is bringing all these music aficionados to our site and others in droves, we can collectively make lyrics the next big music industry money-maker.
As an industry, we need to learn from our past mistakes and embrace and develop this curiosity in an easy, legal and compelling way.
Lets continue to work together to provide fans with the most legal and accurate content, compensate the artists for their work and leverage this unprecedented interest in song construct and lyrics to grow this business.
To the intrepid lyric hunters, I say "keep searching!" and in turn, I promise if you're looking for the right, legal lyrics to say, Beck's "Loser," you'll actually get "Soy Un Perdedor" rather than the more commonly and colloquially misquoted "Sooo... open the door, I am loser baby..."