Rap Genius Website Agrees to License With Music Publishers (original) (raw)
Media|Rap Genius Website Agrees to License With Music Publishers
Advertisement
- May 6, 2014
Rap Genius, a popular website that compiles annotations of song lyrics, has reached a licensing agreement with music publishers after being accused of using the lyrics of thousands of songs without permission.
The agreement announced Tuesday ends a standoff that began in November when the National Music Publishers Association, a trade group, singled out Rap Genius as the most “undesirable” on a list of sites that use lyrics without permission. (Publishers control the copyrights for songwriting and lyrics, which are separate from those for recordings.)
It was a prominent slap by the music business against Rap Genius, which in both the music world and the heady Silicon Valley technology scene has become a popular attraction for its crowd-sourced commentary about rap songs (as well as other texts, like ancient Greek plays) that by turns can be scholarly, irreverent or both.
The site’s three founders have gained a reputation as lovable bad boys and in 2012, the blue-chip venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million; early this year, the service introduced a mobile app.
At the time of the controversy, it appeared that Rap Genius might consider a fair-use defense for its site, which would have allowed it to avoid paying publishers for reprinting their lyrics. But that position was weakened when it was revealed that Rap Genius had already made a licensing deal with Sony/ATV, the world’s largest music publisher. In the face of a potential lawsuit from other publishers, the site agreed to a deal, which it announced in a joint statement with the publishers’ association.
The deal will allow publishers to enter into a settlement covering past uses of their lyrics, and also grant Rap Genius new licenses to republish lyrics in the future. No further details were announced.
“I applaud Rap Genius for respecting the rights of songwriters and compensating them fairly for their work,” David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers Association, said in the announcement. “As more music fans find lyrics they relate to and are curious about online, it becomes imperative that various industries form collaborative partnerships such as what N.M.P.A. and Rap Genius have accomplished today.”
The deal is a victory for music publishers, who have lately been pushing hard over compensation and licensing issues online, with mixed success. In March, for example, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the licensing clearinghouse better known as Ascap, failed to convince a federal judge that the streaming-music service Pandora should pay higher songwriting royalties.
The last several months have also been rocky for Rap Genius. In December, just weeks after being was criticized by the music publishers, the site was penalized by Google, apparently for trying to manipulate its algorithm to place Rap Genius’s pages higher in Google’s search results rankings. The issue was resolved after Rap Genius changed its methods, and the site’s founders said, “We’re sorry for being such morons.”
Advertisement