The Power of Lyrics
Leveraging SEO To Profit From The Words You’ve Already Written
(Originally published Jan 2018. Updated June 2019)
We’ve all been there. You’re out and about minding your own business, and suddenly you’re hit with an earworm; a song that just won’t get out of your head. What is this damn song? You can’t Shazam it, but you need to extract the lyrics bouncing around your left temporal lobe and add that song to your “Guilty Pleasures” playlist on Spotify. Chances are, you Google (or Alexa) the lyrics, and a quick search retrieves the song title in 0.61 seconds.
Song lyrics have been an essential part of the collective listening experience since sheet music and album sleeves have been around. Digital streaming and the Internet have only amplified our obsession, with over five million Google searches for “lyrics” every day.
Many lyrics sites are in the business of funneling this traffic into their ad-infested domains, while refusing to pay songwriters and publishers a royalty for the use. This is usually illegal, and you may be owed some money. More on that in a minute.
Lyrics are an integral part of the booming streaming experience.
According to a recent report, 88% of streaming music subscribers search for lyrics, and 61% of streaming lyrics users consider them essential to the experience (MIDiA).
More and more, tech is trying to keep up with that demand.
Google and Bing have both partnered with LyricFind, a top (legal) lyrics provider that now displays lyrics in directly in the search results page, as well as inside the Google Play Music app.
Spotify has partnered with their own share of lyrics providers over the years, from Musixmatch and most recently Genius, though only for select songs.
Amazon is paving a new frontier for voice controlled lyrics inquiries powered by Alexa, ranking their top 50 most requested lyrics of 2017.
Most recently, lyrics have even inundated our Instagram Stories and Apple TVs, thanks to Musixmatch and DIY distributors like DistroKid. There’s never been a more opportune time for indie songwriters to get their lyrics seen and compensated.
WHERE TO SUBMIT LYRICS
Your Song Metadata
Start at the source by embedding your lyrics directly into your audio files before delivering to music stores. You can do this in most file managers, or use a site like TuneRegistry to ensure clean metadata from the jump.
Official Website
Why direct your fans to other sites when you can have them come to you? Even if it’s an unlisted page on your website, search engines will often list your official lyrics page as a top result. Bandzoogle and Squarespace are two hosting services that make listing lyrics easy and SEO friendly.
Bandcamp
Google searches are the single largest source of sales on Bandcamp. As they put it,
“your fans aren’t just searching for the name of your band, or your latest track — they’re frequently searching for that one lyric snippet they remember.”
When you add lyrics to a track on Bandcamp, it embeds those lyrics in the download file as well. Again, discoverability leads to sales directly to the artist.
LyricFind
In addition to Google and Bing products, LyricFind also delivers lyrics to Pandora, SoundHound, Shazam, Deezer, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Music.
LyricFind is a leading digital aggregator, and compensates songwriters / publishers via Harry Fox Agency. If you are self-published, see LyricFind’s unique submission and collection process at the bottom of this article.
Genius
Formerly Rap Genius, Genius is known for its lyrics annotation and interpretation features. Verified artists can confirm fan interpretations, or write their own official meaning to be taken as gospel.
The company is equally notorious for stirring controversy in its early days. The Genius folks were once in a very public legal battle with the National Music Publishers’ Association for displaying lyrics without compensating rights holders. Genius was also eviscerated by Google in 2013 for black hat SEO practices, after stuffing their code with unrelated tags like “Justin Bieber” and “The Beatles”.
Since then, Genius has made big strides to make things right with creators. From reaching an agreement with the NMPA (see if you’re eligible to be an NMPA member here) to hiring music licensing staff, Genius now pays blanket display licenses to publishers in addition to more innovative initiatives such as securing synch licenses for their original YouTube series “VERIFIED,” displaying “Behind the Lyrics” on Spotify, and creating an interactive pop-up collaboration with Dropbox (invoking a rare “industrial” license).
Many publishing royalties on Genius do go unclaimed, though the company holds on to royalties for a window until composers can collect them. Songwriters should strongly consider publishing to the site, which sees around 100 million monthly visits, and yields 82% of its traffic from organic search results.
Listen to Genius’ Chief Strategy Officer Ben Gross and Head of Music Licensing Laura Kinniburgh discuss how the company’s evolution has changed its approach to licensing over time. Add your lyrics to Genius here.
Musixmatch
Musixmatch claims to be the “world’s largest lyrics platform.” Similar to Genius, the company gamifies the crowd-sourcing of lyrics and lyric data to build a robust database while rewarding users. The company secures licenses with numerous publishers and labels, as well as Vevo, MetroLyrics, AZlyrics and Shazam.
Formerly the exclusive lyrics provider for Spotify, Musixmatch now boasts huge partnerships for their live-synched lyrics product. Add your lyrics to Musixmatch here. Then, live sync them on your mobile app for karaoke-style playback on YouTube, Instagram Stories, Apple Music and Apple TV (coming this fall).
Closed Captioning on YouTube and Facebook Videos
According to multiple publishers, 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. In addition, there are 48 million deaf and hard of hearing people in the US alone. That leaves a huge market demand for captioning your lyrics in your music videos and official song art.
Moreover, closed captions are indexed by YouTube, Google, and Facebook’s search algorithms, so consider it part of your SEO strategy as well. This will also encourage foreign languages to more easily translate the words and open up your videos to entirely new markets
To add closed captioning to your music videos, follow YouTube’s guidelines. Then, download the “.SRT” file from YouTube and upload it to the same video on Facebook and Vimeo.
Voilà! You may now reap the benefits of some increased web traffic (the organic kind) and milking your publishing for all it’s got. Now, go write some more lyrics!
How To Get Paid
- “If you have not entered into a contract with a publisher and you are not composing under a work-made-for-hire agreement, then the moment you create a copyrightable composition you are the publisher” (Dae Bogan)
- If you are self-publishing, you should form a publishing entity
- Sign up for appropriate collection societies including a PRO and Harry Fox Agency
- Review agreements in the HFA Online Agreements Portal and opt in to the ones you wish to join (including LyricFind, Apple Music, Facebook)
- HFA pays the lyrics display license fee quarterly to your HFA Online Account
- If you wish to not have your lyrics displayed, you can issue a takedown notice, per the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
- Voilà! You may now reap the benefits of some increased web traffic (the organic kind) and milking your publishing for all it’s got. Now, go write some more lyrics!
