Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist. The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a "libretto" and their writer, as a "librettist". The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of expression. Rappers can also create lyrics that are meant to be spoken rhythmically rather than sung.
Copyrights can either be licensed or assigned by the owner of the copyright. A copyright collective is a non-governmental body created by copyright law or private agreement which licenses copyrighted works on behalf of the authors and engages in collective rights management. Copyright societies track all the events and venues where copyrighted works are used and ensure that the copyright holders listed with the society are remunerated for such usage. The copyright society publishes its own tariff scheme on its websites and collects a nominal administrative fee on every transaction.
A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.
MP3.com is a web site operated by Paramount Global publishing tabloid-style news items about digital music and artists, songs, services, and technologies. It is better known for its original incarnation as a legal, free music-sharing service, named after the popular music file format MP3, popular with independent musicians for promoting their work. That service was shut down on December 2, 2003, by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name, established the current MP3.com site.
Last.fm Limited is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user's computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred ("scrobbled") to Last.fm's database either via the music player or via a plug-in installed into the user's music player. The data is then displayed on the user's profile page and compiled to create reference pages for individual artists.
Yahoo! Music Radio was an Internet radio service. The service, which featured both an advertising supported free version and a subscription fee-based premium version, allowed users to create personalized Internet radio stations by rating songs selected by a recommender system. Users were also able to listen to music from 150 preset Internet radio stations.
GameSpot is an American video gaming website that provides news, reviews, previews, downloads, and other information on video games. The site was launched on May 1, 1996, created by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady and Jon Epstein. In addition to the information produced by GameSpot staff, the site also allows users to write their own reviews, blogs, and post on the site's forums. It has been owned by Fandom, Inc. since October 2022.
Answers.com, formerly known as WikiAnswers, is an Internet-based knowledge exchange. The Answers.com domain name was purchased by entrepreneurs Bill Gross and Henrik Jones at idealab in 1996. The domain name was acquired by NetShepard and subsequently sold to GuruNet and then AFCV Holdings. The website is now the primary product of the Answers Corporation. It has tens of millions of user-generated questions and answers, and provides a website where registered users can interact with one another.
TV.com was a website owned by Red Ventures that covered television series and episodes with a focus on English-language shows made or broadcast in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Originally launched by CNET in the mid-1990s, the website was transformed in 2005 when CNET acquired the website TV Tome and incorporated its assets into the new website's composition. CNET Networks, including the TV.com site, was later purchased by CBS in 2008. In its heyday, TV.com emphasized user-generated content listings for a wide variety of programs that included episode air dates, descriptions, news, season listings, notes, credits, trivia, and a forum section.
Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) is a privately owned company that was founded in the US in 1988 by Howard Rachinski. CCLI was launched after being developed by Rachinski for 3½ years while he was a music minister at a large church in Portland, Oregon. This prototype, called Starpraise Ministries, began in May 1985. CCLI offers copyright licensing of songs and other resource materials for use in Christian worship.
The Harry Fox Agency (HFA) is a provider of rights management and collector and distributor of mechanical license fees on behalf of music publishers in the United States. HFA has over 48,000 music publishing clients and issues the largest number of licenses for physical and digital formats of music. It was founded in 1927 by the National Music Publishers Association. The agency was sold to performing rights organization SESAC in 2015, which was itself acquired by The Blackstone Group in 2017.
Ultimate Guitar, also known as Ultimate-Guitar.com or simply UG, is an online platform for guitarists and musicians, started on October 9, 1998 by Eugeny Naidenov and based in San Francisco, US. Its website and mobile application provide free and paid user-submitted guitar tablatures and chord sheets, as well as video courses, reviews of music and equipment, interviews with musicians and forums.
AOL Radio powered by Slacker was an online radio service available in the United States only. It had over 200 free internet radio stations.
LyricWiki was an online wiki-based lyrics database and encyclopedia. In March 2013, it was the seventh largest MediaWiki installation with over 2,000,000 pages including 1.5 million songs. Prior to its shutdown, users on the site could view, edit, and discuss the lyrics of songs, which were also available for purchase from links on the site. Users were told to be mindful of copyright while contributing, and copyright violations were removed upon request. All the lyrics on LyricWiki were licensed through LyricFind.
Gracenote, Inc. is a company and service that provides music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies, worldwide. Formerly CDDB, Gracenote maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. From 2008 to 2014, it was owned by Sony, later sold to Tribune Media, and has been owned since 2017 by Nielsen Holdings.
RedTube is a pornographic video sharing site, which in September 2009 held an Alexa ranking within the world's top 100 sites. It is one of several pornographic websites owned by Aylo. In June 2010 it had fallen out of the top 100, but it made a return in mid-2012. As of mid September 2020 its Alexa ranking was 520. Its popularity has been ascribed to its non-sexual name, which is a reference to the non-pornographic video sharing website YouTube. The website is based in Houston, Texas and has servers in San Francisco, New Orleans and Montreal.
Torrentz was a Finland-based metasearch engine for BitTorrent, run by an individual known as Flippy and founded on 24 July 2003. It indexed torrents from various major torrent websites and offered compilations of various trackers per torrent that were not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker was down, other trackers could do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website in 2012.
CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client is able to display the artist name, CD title, track list and some additional information. CDDB is a licensed trademark of Gracenote, Inc.
Grooveshark was a web-based music streaming service owned and operated by Escape Media Group in the United States. Users could upload digital audio files, which could then be streamed and organized in playlists. The Grooveshark website had a search engine, music streaming features, and a music recommendation system.
Genius is an American digital media company founded on August 27, 2009, by Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory, and Mahbod Moghadam. Its website serves as an online music encyclopedia allowing users to provide annotations and interpretation to song lyrics, news stories, sources, poetry, and documents.
