Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Yahoo Music now offers the lyrics to 400,000 songs from nearly 100 publishers, including BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner/Chappell.
Some 9000-odd artists are covered, so whether your taste runs to Bing Crosby or Beyoncé, Yahoo Music has some lyrics for you. But the coverage is patchy - some artist searches return a seemingly comprehensive list of lyrics, where others show only a few obscure songs.
While it isn't hard to find sites offering lyrics, they generally suffer from two drawbacks.
Firstly, they're unofficial, so the copyright owners probably aren't getting their cut. And if the lyrics were keyed in by someone who had been listening to the tracks, there's no guarantee that they're accurate. I could have sworn I heard Juice Newton sing "just brush my teeth before you leave me" rather than "just touch my cheek..." Then there's the Bob Marley line I misheard about "a roof rack over our heads" - but you won't find that one on Yahoo Music.
Secondly, lyrics sites tend to be on the seedy side, with pop-ups galore and the nagging feeling that malware is being delivered along with the words to your favourite songs. Yahoo Music pages are ad-heavy, but there is reportedly a revenue-sharing arrangement with the music publishers.
Gracenote's lyrics service operates in conjunction with the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency, which ensures songs are properly identified and royalties paid to publishers according to their agreements with Gracenote.
Other companies are likely to sign up to use Gracenote's lyrics database. An obvious candidate is Apple - Gracenote lyrics could easily be integrated with iTunes, which already has the ability to transfer lyrics to recent iPods. Various developers have created add-ons that scour unofficial lyrics sites for the words to tracks in the user's iTunes library.
Gracenote, which provides the track identification technology used in many music playing programs including Apple's iTunes, started out as CDDB, a collaborative project where users entered track and album information in return for being able to use similar information provided by others.
David Bass
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