Michael Walker: All right, excited here today with my new friend, Daryl Ballantyne. Daryl is the founder and CEO of LyricFind. They launched in 2004 and are the world's largest licensed digital lyrics provider. They serve clients like Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Pandora. He's also a pioneer in music licensing. He helped sign the first mass lyrics licensing deal with EMI in 2005, maintains relationships with over 10,000 music publishers, including the Harry Fox Agency, and many more. He's also an industry authority and speaker, talking about licensing digital content.

I'm really grateful to have him on the podcast today to talk a little bit about LyricFind as a platform and some creative ways that artists can monetize their music without necessarily relying on traditional methods like touring and streaming. So, Daryl, thank you for taking the time to be here today.

Darryl Ballantyne: Thanks for having me on. I'm glad we could find a time to make this happen.

Michael: Absolutely. So, to kick things off for anyone meeting you or connecting with you for the first time, could you share a little bit about the story behind starting LyricFind and what the main problem was that you set out to solve?

Darryl: So the answer to that is kind of, it depends. It depends on which time we started LyricFind. We first tried starting LyricFind in 2000 as a regular lyric website because one of my co-founders, Chris, was trying to figure out the name of a song based on just a little bit of the lyrics he remembered. He couldn't figure it out. None of us knew what it was, and when we tried searching online based on the lyrics, we found that none of these lyric sites out there let us search by lyrics. So, we said, "Let's start our own."

But we quickly realized that was a licensing nightmare. The site became really popular for the nine months we had it up, and then we realized we needed to get licensing. So, we took everything down and tried to get licensing from music publishers to display the lyrics. But that was next to impossible, especially in 2000 when the music industry was trying to shut down the internet rather than work with it. So, we moved on from that and shut it down. We were in university at the time, so we just finished school and then came back to it in 2004.

At that point, I was supposed to go work at EMI in LA, working on digital music licensing deals after graduating. I was in the perfect metaphor for startup life. I was with my family at Canada's Wonderland, an amusement park just north of Toronto, about to step on a roller coaster when my phone rang. It was someone from Microsoft launching the MSN Music Store. They had found our old website, which didn't have any lyrics on it anymore, but still had my phone number. They called and said, "We're launching this music store, and we'd like to include lyric functionality. Can you license it?"

I said, "Well, no, but let me make some calls." So, I called my co-founders, called Ted Cohen, who was my boss at EMI, and asked, "Should we come back to this as an aggregator rather than a destination site ourselves? Has the industry changed enough?" One thing led to another, and Ted came on as a part of our board of directors, helping us get the first licensing deals. Needless to say, I never went back to work at EMI and haven’t had a real job ever since.

Michael: That's awesome! I love hearing the origin stories of companies like that. You mentioned that the purpose you set out to solve has changed. Were you inferring that somewhat recently? Has the core problem changed as well, or was that part of the story from the start?

Darryl: Yeah, no, it was really just at the beginning that things changed from us being consumer-facing to B2B. The crazy thing about the core part of our business, lyric licensing, is that when we did those first licensing deals in 2004-2005 with companies like EMI and HFA, those deals outlined models for lyrics based on per display, advertising revenue share, subscription revenue share, and per device for hardware devices.

Those are all in those initial deals from 20 years ago, and those are the exact same models we still use now, offering all that flexibility. It's cool but also ridiculous that none of that has changed in 20 years—that it's still based on the same models we planned for back then. But what we've been doing…

Michael: Good job planning them!

Darryl: Guess, or a bad job innovating, one of the two, but what has changed is we started off with just static lyrics and licensing for the U.S. and Canada. That has evolved into licensing everywhere in the world, having synchronization initially line by line, and now word by word. Well, synchronization, doing translations of lyrics, and really expanding on the lyric experience more, rather than the licensing models. So that has all changed a lot. Plus, we recently, last year, acquired a company called Rotor Videos, which, among other video types, creates lyric videos for labels and independent artists. They also create things like Spotify Canvas videos, Apple Motion Art videos, and all those things. So we keep finding new uses for lyrics, whether it's on the video side. We have a product called Lyric IQ that analyzes music through the lyrics, and we're licensing in places that, you know, 20 years ago, I would have told you were insane. Even 10 years ago, I would have told you it was insane for things like automotive—who would have thought that lyrics in cars would be a thing, especially when you don't want to distract the driver? But now that you've got these massive entertainment systems for connected cars, you've got rear seat entertainment, you've got charge time entertainment, and you've got people planning for entertainment while you're sitting in waiting for your kids to finish their swimming lessons. The possibilities just continue to open up in new markets that we didn't see coming back then. That's for sure.

Michael: Yeah. That's super interesting. My mind goes to... And I know this is sort of a tricky subject right now as it relates to music and licensing, but AI as it relates to generative music and with lyrics in particular, I feel like the lyrics have been some of the most challenging parts that I've found when using these AI tools. Like, it just doesn't do a great job. It's usually way too campy or too cliché. It just doesn’t quite get it. At least that's been my experience. I don't know if things have changed so fast these days, but that's the first thing.

Darryl: I agree with that.

Michael: This massive...

Darryl: I think a lot of the AI-generated lyrics that I've seen are great if you want to have a parody song or something like that, or you're not taking it too seriously. For writing a real, true, great song, I don't think they come close to the great songwriters that we have now. It's a very different skill set than something a computer can just do.

Michael: I know, I would love to be able to use a platform where I could go like ChatGPT, but actually write good lyrics for a song. That would be incredible.

Darryl: I'd love to be able to write good anything when it comes to music. You know, I'm unfortunately not a musically talented person myself, but obviously a huge fan of music. So, I have a massive amount of admiration for the skill set that all these great musicians have, that I just do not.

Michael: It's going to be crazy to see how things evolve in the next 5, 10, 20 years, but it really does kind of feel like now is the time where curation and people who are fans of music, who have a good ear and good taste... I mean, it's kind of always been the case with producers, where in some cases, they don't even play instruments themselves, but they just have a good ear and they can direct what they want to hear. I wonder if, I don't know, 10, 20 years from now, the creation process will focus more on the mind and what ideas people are coming up with. Then we can use tools like AI to help generate some of these ideas. But anyways, I'm going to call myself back.

Darryl: It’s really interesting to see how things will evolve and even the tools that are out there to allow people to create content. The most recent example I saw was my son, who is nine years old, writing a video game. He started adding music to it and he's using AI tools to create music. He plays something, and I hear it in the background while he's off working on it. And it actually sounds good. He doesn't know anything about music or notation. He's learning to play the recorder at school, but he's making good, like, I'll say, video game-quality music using these tools that are out there. It's really impressive that this capability exists.

Michael: That's so cool that he's able to be creating a video game at nine years old.

Darryl: Got lots of aspirations. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, you know, just on the podcast, we released an episode a few weeks ago, interviewing Nolan Arbaugh, who’s the first patient to get a Neuralink installed. So, a brain-computer interface. He’s basically paralyzed below the neck down. And on the podcast, he used his Neuralink with an AI generation tool to create a song telepathically. That was amazing. It was such a cool experience to be a part of. And yeah, just like a glimpse into a future where our creativity is sort of unlocked, where it starts with the idea and then we can actually turn that idea into music. But, you know, Daryl, I know that you have a lot of experience as it relates to royalties, licensing, and different revenue streams for artists. And so, I'm curious for anyone that's here right now, that's an independent artist who's always looking for ways to generate a sustainable income with their music, and maybe they're looking for different methods beyond streaming and touring and whatnot. What are some other creative ways that they can use things like their lyrics to monetize?

Darryl: There are lots of different uses now for lyrics, and it's becoming a bigger and bigger revenue stream for artists and publishers. So, as streaming grows and all the major streaming services have lyrics integrated into their services, that usage continues to grow. And in general, the more usage, the more money there is in it for the songwriter. So, every time those lyrics are displayed through LyricFind on any of those services, that creates a payment to the publisher or songwriter, or whoever controls the rights to that. So, making sure that your lyrics are available, making sure that they are synchronized, is super important. A lot of platforms now use synchronized lyrics, and some of them will only show the lyrics if they're synchronized because they want to maintain the experience. That’s at a base level to capture some of that revenue. But on top of the regular base displays, having lyrics in a database like ours makes the music more discoverable. People are searching by lyrics. If they’re like Chris was 20 years ago, trying to figure out the name of a song they just heard, whether it was on the radio, walking through a store, or anywhere else, and they liked it, they’re trying to find it. The lyrics are the biggest way that people figure out what that is. So, having the lyrics in there makes it searchable, makes it discoverable by all those people to then find your music and find other ways to support an artist as well. Then, on top of that, with LyricIQ, if your lyrics are in our database, they get parsed by LyricIQ to tag them with things like emotion, sentiment values, content filtration, subject matter analysis, so that gets used by sync licensing platforms, playlisting, and other programming services to find songs with the right context, the right child-friendly level, or child-unfriendly level if you want to create different types of playlists. So that’s really important. It all helps in discoverability. But then, you can go beyond just the displays and discoverability. A great way to capitalize on your music and monetize it is through lyric videos. A lot of artists don’t have official videos on YouTube. A lot of music, whether it's new or older catalog, just doesn't have an official presence there. And as a result, what ends up happening is, if you're lucky, a user makes a UGC version of the video, whether it's a lyric video or an artwork video or something like that. So, there is some presence on there, and then you're getting a little bit of money off of that YouTube content ID and those types of claims, but that doesn’t monetize it anywhere near the same level as an official video. And if it gets a lot of traffic, that traffic is going to somebody else’s channel and you’re not reaching your fans in the same way. You’re not controlling that reach for fans. So, with our lyric video platform and the capabilities in the Rotor Videos platform, it allows artists to make videos really, really quickly and easily for all of that content that look amazing. The lyrics are, of course, accurate. They’ll either use lyrics from our database or they can be added by the artist to make sure that they're perfect and have a really high-quality video there that drives traffic to your own channel, monetizes at a higher rate directly to you that you control. You get all the knock-on effects from that. So, it’s really important to make sure that you have an official presence, especially on major platforms like YouTube, but all the other video platforms as well, so that you control it, you can monetize it, and there's a much better ROI. And if somebody finds it, the benefit goes to you. Those types of usages are really, really key to maximizing value just from your lyrics, not only to get that direct compensation from the royalties for it but also all of the secondary effects and the network effects of capturing that traffic.

Michael: Super helpful. Yeah, so it just sounds like a couple of the ones that you just brought up are, one, making sure that the lyrics are available, and that when you're distributing your music, you actually have the synchronized lyrics. And that automatically, when you do that, the publishing gets paid out.

And then the other one that you brought up was the lyric videos. So making sure that rather than the traffic going to a channel that’s not yours, that you don’t own, just having a lyric video. A lot of times, people are looking for lyric videos so they can watch it, see it at the same time. And the platform that you've acquired now gives you the ability to easily and quickly create those lyric videos. Oh, that's awesome. I've literally just found myself really wanting a good platform through which I could create lyric videos quickly and easily. Like, just a week ago, I think I was using Descript to try to create one. It kind of worked, but it was really difficult.
 Could you tell me a little bit more about that lyric video capability and how someone can get started with that?

Darryl: Yeah. So it's available at rotorvideos.com. Or we have a secondary platform that we built on the LyricFind side that is more of an enterprise edition for labels who want to do high-volume, bulk creation. So we have a project right now, for example, where we're generating, I think, 16,000 videos for a client.

But it’s automatically going through, grabs the lyrics from our database, uses a template design, and creates them. It can do them really quickly. But Rotor Videos, the platform, allows you to have a little more design control. There's a library of over 3 million clips that you can add in, you can use album art, different effects and styles on the videos. And design them. It'll also take your audio and automatically sync the lyrics when you provide them and transcribe them. So it makes it a really easy process. It's quick and easy. You can do it in a couple of minutes instead of, you know, the hours it can take to try to manually generate it with other platforms or using a regular video editor. So it takes the torture out of that creation process, and it becomes really easy to make an album's worth of lyric videos, for example. Just a few minutes' work, and you don’t need any real video editing experience or anything like that. Just pick the themes and things that match your music. And it’s so quick and easy.

We’re working on integrations with that into other distribution platforms as well, for example, to make it more accessible to everyone. But yeah, it’s just available on rotorvideos.com. You can also make Spotify canvas videos, Apple Music album motion art, and other music videos and artwork videos, different aspect ratios. And it's really customizable but also super easy to use.

Michael: Yeah, that's sick. That's super cool. Yeah. I remember when I was starting with my band about 12 or 13 years ago now, one of the first things that we did was we created lyric videos from our songs. It was a kind of in-between, like having lyric videos before we even had the budget or the ability to record full music videos. And it was such a smart thing to do. And, uh, yeah, that's a great resource to be able to share so that people can start out with those. If you don't have a video yet for music, you've got to at least have a lyric video. And it’s so much easier using a platform like Rotor to do that.

Darryl: Exactly. It's an easy way to plant your flag in a video platform or in YouTube to have an official video for it. Because if there's an official video there, people aren't going to bother to create a UGC one that steals the traffic from you and monetizes at a lower level. You’re going to capture all that.

We do a lot of work for labels where we’re creating the lyric videos in advance of the release so that, on the day of the release, the video goes out onto the artist’s official channel and captures all that traffic and preempts the UGC side of it. So they’re the first one in the algorithm, in the search results, rather than something else.

And it makes a huge, huge difference in the monetization of that video and the rest of your channel.

Michael: That totally makes sense. Yeah. Now, I bet there’s just tons of creative use cases for lyrics in general too. Like, they're such a vital part of the creativity and the way our brain conceptualizes some of the meaning behind what we're listening to. Even things like t-shirts, branding, and hooks and stuff.

I don't know if you guys have built any integrations with print-on-demand type of things, or if you have any thoughts or guidance as it relates to other creative ways to use the lyrics.

Darryl: Yeah, we actually launched a product called Lyric Merch a while ago that was integrated with print-on-demand on the back end. People could pick any line from the songs that we had licenses for merch and put it on a number of different products, whether it was t-shirts, mouse pads, even shower curtains, and build a design.

The challenge that we ran into with that was it's very difficult to create a new e-commerce destination, and it's very difficult to compete with unlicensed options that are out there from an economic perspective, especially when we're working with the publishers and not necessarily the labels on that for band names and name and likeness issues.

So that became a challenge for us, and we shut down the front-end, the consumer-facing side. But we do still offer those rights from a licensing standpoint to partners who want to create their own merch and have their own platform and audience and want to do it legally, rather than just look at the unlicensed content on Etsy or RedBubble or places like that, that have one-off independent stores. If it’s a larger scale or an actual company that wants to be legit, we can provide those licenses.

Michael: Hmm, okay. Yeah, that’s super interesting. So if I’m hearing you correctly, right now, there’s a lot of unlicensed people who are selling products, which, technically, is that illegal? If they actually use the lyric, but because they’re kind of one-off shops in general, they’re kind of sliding underneath the rug?

Darryl: It’s hard to enforce.

Michael: That it actually would be.

Darryl: It's hard to enforce both from a scale perspective because, when we initially worked with publishers to get LyricFind websites licensed, if they reached a certain traffic threshold, it was easy to go and license that platform and target the ones that are meaningful. It's not like the publishers ever wanted to go after fan sites that posted lyrics or things like that. That never happened and was never the intention. But with merch, it's a lot harder, not only because there are a lot of independent sellers on places like Amazon, Etsy, or Redbubble, where it's kind of "whack-a-mole" for copyright claims and there isn't a good, efficient way to license everyone, but also because merchandise licensing itself is a trickier business. Often, it requires writer approval, and there are a lot of design rules and things around what can go on that merchandise. Like, you're not going to take a Disney lyric and put it next to a picture of a gun on T-shirts, for example, right? That's just not allowed. So it's infinitely more complicated and a lot harder to police as a result. The ROI on policing it for publishers just wasn't there for the most part.

Michael: So when you just shared that about Disney, it reminded me of something somewhat recently. They opened up their Grok XAI. Their whole thing was like, "there are no rules," like basically when they first opened it. I live about 10 minutes away from Disney World, and the first thing that I went to was—I don't know what this speaks to in terms of my personal character, but I was like, "Mickey Mouse with a gun," and I touched that. It was Mickey Mouse, and it was absurd. It was like, "This just doesn't make sense visually." But yeah, I tried to put that on a T-shirt and sell it. Oh my gosh, I can also imagine how it could be tricky to enforce from a standpoint of like, if you have a song called "Love," and the hook, the chorus is like "love," and you throw that on a T-shirt—who's going to be like, "Hey, that's my song"?

Darryl: Exactly. How do you define which song is attributed to a short lyric? We had instances where we had licenses for one version of a song but not another because of the way it works either territorially or with co-publishers, things like that. Or you’ve got two completely different songs, but they happen to share a five-word line that is commonly associated with one song but was licensed through the other song. It gets complicated.

Michael: It's just tricky business. Yeah, and maybe this can tie into the last question I was curious about hearing from you. Obviously, you have a lot of background in licensing, royalties, and copyright law as it relates to lyrics. Right now, and I know a lot of things are changing fast, but with AI, there's a lot of question marks around copyrights and what should be allowed, what shouldn’t be allowed, and what training data should be allowed to be used. If it's creating an original piece of artwork using the training data, should that be compensated? And as it relates to influences, like all of us, all of our music was in some way influenced by our favorite artists, and it kind of goes back to original sources—how do we, like, are we going to pay back to...? So, yeah, I’m curious, when you look forward 5, 10, 20 years as it relates to lyrics in particular and the art of songwriting, what are you imagining the trend to be? And how can artists watching this right now really get the most out of their lyric writing, their songwriting, and also use the tools available to express themselves?

Darryl: I think, looking forward 5, 10, 20 years, there's going to be a lot of lawyers making a lot of money with AI and that, and a lot of other question marks, as you say. It's extremely complicated. But I do think there are a lot of great, really productive uses for AI. It's a great tool that can be used by songwriters and aspiring songwriters. And, you know, maybe like me, who don't really have much of that skill, but being able to use those tools to help with suggestions, to help get different terminology or ideas from it to help clear writer's block, for example. You know, I’m trying to find a way to say this or that, and hey, AI, can you suggest a couple of ways to say this or things that rhyme with this if you're trying to make it and give it those parameters?

As we were saying earlier, I don't think that it really becomes a true substitute for a serious songwriter and someone writing great songs to do the whole thing, but absolutely, I see it being used as a tool. I see it being used as something that can help make the process easier and faster. The challenge, of course, becomes what you were saying before: How do we license that, and how do we attribute that properly? We grew up in an era where bands would happily say who they were influenced by, and they were inspired by this artist or that artist. Now, there’s almost a fear of saying that you’re inspired by this because someone is going to sue you for copyright infringement. The pendulum has swung the other way, where being influenced by somebody means you're infringing on their work. There's so much music being released that it’s next to impossible—there are no original note sequences left, right? We've used them all. So by definition, you're infringing on somebody by writing any song.

I think there needs to be, over the next decade or two, some changes to copyright law to lift the cloud of fear that things like "Blurred Lines" or all the Ed Sheeran cases—he’s won those, but those aren’t things that an artist should be afraid of when they're truly writing an original work. They should be able to create freely and admit that they're influenced or inspired by somebody, because that’s how music has always evolved. Not everything has to be about infringement or getting a copyright judgment against somebody. A piece of it can just be part of the process, part of the industry, part of the ecosystem of creativity. But finding where that line is, is difficult. I think it has to move from where it is now, but where that line is, I still have no idea.

But I'd like to see more freedom of creativity, and that probably involves the use of AI tools. But if you're training generative AI tools off of existing content, there should be some level of compensation there. How that gets tracked and allocated is also extremely difficult, and I don't think there's an easy answer. Hence, it being the lawyers' full-employment act. But we'll figure it out. The music industry, for all its faults, eventually figures out how to work with technology. It’s in its nature kind of the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the entertainment industry. Whether it's a smaller file size or a smaller snippet or amount of time, it becomes easier for technological innovations to hit music first, then before the rest of the entertainment industry. So we're always the ones who have to figure it out first and go through those growing pains. With press play and Napster in the early days and things like that—even original Napster and things like Rockstar and other things way back when—those were all precursors to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, and all the other services. They didn’t have to figure it out with piracy the same way that music did. And the same is true for AI and other technological innovations. Music gets stuck having to figure it out first, and then the rest of the industry learns from our process.

Michael: That's super interesting. Yeah, and it definitely makes sense in terms of we weren't talking about original source and copyright material and being influenced by other people. That's always been a tricky line to draw because we don't exist in a vacuum; we had to be inspired by someone or something else.

It came to mind—almost like an analogy between parents and children, how the child has the DNA of their parents and is going to go out and do their own thing and be their own person, but you can't be like, "Hey, you're actually your dad because you have that DNA in you."

In a similar way, we have our "parents" of who inspired us to make music, and we have our influences, but it creates a new "child" that is its own thing. You can't separate the DNA from it; it came out of something.

Darryl: Yep, exactly. It's nature versus nurture in a lot of ways, but we're never without influence.

Michael: Good stuff. Well, it certainly got more metaphysical than I thought it was going to be, but I really enjoyed it. So, Daryl, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to share your story and some of the lessons you've learned for artists to help them get discovered and make sustainable income with their music.

For those artists watching this right now who are interested in checking out LyricFind or making sure they've got their bases covered when it comes to getting discovered with their lyrics, what's the best place for them to go to dive deeper into the resources?

Darryl: So if they go to lyricfind.com, they can sign up to be a verified artist on our platform. That gives them the ability to manage all their own lyrics, make sure they're in there (if we don't have them already), edit them, synchronize them (if it's not already done). So that's the easiest way to do it: sign up there and make sure your publisher has a licensing deal with us if you're signed to a publisher. If you're not, you can grant us the rights yourself. But virtually every publisher we have a deal with at this point, so odds are, you're covered. Just go to lyricfind.com, and you can learn a lot more about the video products there too, or just go straight to rotorvideos.com.

Michael: All right, fantastic. Well, like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. And Daryl, thanks again for being on the episode today.

Darryl: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.