Gimme Lyrics

Sure, finding the words to a song online may be just a click away, but is it legal?

By Julene Snyder

It was in Miss Collins' sixth grade class where I first got interested in deciphering song lyrics. A child of the '60s, Miss Collins was all flowing hair, billowing scarves and big-bell Levi's. She delighted in music appreciation class each day, when she'd pull out the battered turntable and play us her favorite 45s -- "Teach Your Children," "Alone Again (Naturally)" and "Bye Bye Miss American Pie."

I vividly remember sitting in that room, listening to Don McLean's lament for old time rock 'n' roll and feeling a delicious shiver move up my spine. When that man drove his Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, I wanted to go there with him. I wanted to go so badly that I begged and pestered and pleaded until I got a huge advance on my allowance and bought my own turntable and my own copy of "Bye Bye Miss American Pie." At last I'd be able to finally figure out exactly what all the words were.

But it wasn't so easy as that. "Who was Jane Steen?," I asked my mother after I'd finished carefully writing down all the words just the way I'd heard them. "I have no idea," she replied, distracted. "But the song says it right here, 'In a coat, he borrowed, from Jane Steen.'" She shook her head, baffled. So I shrugged, and assumed that Jane Steen must just be too hip for my square Mom to have ever heard of.

It was years before I figured out the problem: There was no Jane Steen. The line refers to James Dean.

Oh.

Today, of course, we have the Internet, which -- theoretically at least -- should save future generations from gaffes like mine. In fact, it takes but a click to go straight to www.don-mclean.com, which not only has the lyrics to "Bye Bye Miss American Pie," but interprets those lyrics line by line.

While we're cautioned that McLean "has not and will not provide an explanation of the 'meaning' of 'American Pie," and told that this interpretation is just the take of dozens of fans over the years, I'll bet that today Miss Collins would have her classroom go to this site as part of that music appreciation class. And she'd be able to, legally, since the site is sanctioned by the artist himself.

But what of "Alone Again (Naturally)"? "Gimme Shelter"? "Teach Your Children"? While there are fan sites aplenty with song lyrics of specific artists sprinkled all over the Internet, attempts to compile these lyrics into a searchable database have been thwarted via legal means for years.

In mid-1998, the Online Guitar Archive (OLGA), an online library of guitar music charts, was shut down after being threatened with legal action by the Harry Fox Agency, which handles the issuing of licenses and collection of royalties on behalf of music publishers in the U.S. This was on the heels of another site's shutdown; GuitarTabs.com, which took down content after wrangling with Warner Bros. over the issue of perceived copyright infringement.

In early 1999, the International Lyrics Server (www.lyrics.ch) was also shut down after music publishers got a bit medieval and sent in the police to seize the site's computers in Switzerland; the service had contained the lyrics to more than 100,000 songs. After negotiations with the Harry Fox Agency, the site has since gone back up, but users must not only agree that "access to the ILS does not grant you the right to reproduce, copy or distribute by any means, method or process whatsoever, now known or hereafter developed, any of the information obtained via the ILS, including the song lyrics contained on this site," but the lyrics are displayed in a way designed to make cutting and pasting them difficult. (But not impossible for those who are fluent in bypassing such systems.)

Lyricfind.com, a business founded by a quartet of students at Canada's University of Waterloo, is apparently on the verge of going legit. Founded in the spring of 2000, the site has not only compiled a database of around 50,000 song lyrics, but it adds the twist of letting visitors search not just by song title or artist, but by lyric. That's a feature that's invaluable for anybody who's ever heard a song on the radio but didn't quite catch the artist or title.

Lyricfind's CEO, Daryl Ballantyne, is just 20 years old, but he's managed to be on the verge of getting licenses for the Lyricfind.com database. Part of that success may be due to the company's decision to voluntarily pull unlicensed content in early December until details could be hammered out with the Canadian Music Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA) to legally display the lyrics.

Even still, Ballantyne says the site currently gets 150,000 page views a month with around 15,000 unique visitors a day. He says that the company is close to hammering out details of a deal which would involve payments of less than a penny on a "per song" basis to the publishers.

"Our position is that the use of song lyrics aids in music sales," says Ballantyne. "When we can integrate our search services with music retailers, they'll see that they can not only make money off licensing, but increase sales as well."

Ballantyne's optimistic that once minor details have been hammered out, Lyricfind.com will get the green light from the CMRRA. While he allows that it's possible that part of the deal may be a requirement that the site make it difficult for viewers to cut-and-paste lyrics, he admits that there's no way to keep those determined to circumvent the system from coming up with a way to do so.

So perhaps, just perhaps, this generation won't have to know the pain I did back in the olden days, when Jane Steen was a woman of mystery and I was one confused sixth-grader.

[ran in ev, February 2001]