Attributor Releases Report on Copying of Song Lyrics Online

Business Wire, Nov 5, 2007

New Findings Show 100 Percent of Copied Sources Outrank Official Version in Google Search

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Attributor Corporation, provider of the world's first Web-wide content monitoring and analysis platform, announced today the release of a research report analyzing the reuse of song lyrics online. The report uncovers major opportunities for the creators and publishers of lyrics content, both in terms of revenue and connecting consumers to official sites.

Attributor, who officially launched its product today in a separate announcement (http://www.attributor.com/morenews5.php), used its content monitoring platform to track Yahoo! Music's official version of song lyrics for 14 popular songs across billions of pages online. The three-week study showed more than 1,500 total lyrics matches with over 900 of them appearing on pages generating revenue from advertisements. Artists and publishers see none of this revenue as Yahoo! Music is the only mass-market site to pay royalties through its Gracenote partnership.

The report highlights several important aspects around the duplication of lyrics on the Web. Key findings include the following:

* Song lyrics - the sixth most searched for phrase on the Web in 2006 - are copied extensively on lyrics sites, fan sites and social networks.

* Proliferation of unauthorized lyrics content represents significantly underutilized business opportunities, such as the ability to increase traffic and search rank of official sites by requesting attribution links from copies, revenue sharing from advertising on copied pages and the ability to place promotional information or widgets on pages that include lyrics.

* Advertising-driven lyrics sites place well in popular search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, and advertising systems, such as Google AdSense, present high click-value advertising that in many cases is directed to copied lyrics, showing the complex relationship between links, search engine results and advertising networks.

* Official Yahoo! Music song lyrics pages - which, until MTV and AOL's recent announcement, was the only online lyrics site to pay royalties based on downloaded lyrics - are outranked by sites copying lyrics over 80 percent of the time in Yahoo! search engine and 100 percent of the time in Google search engine.

Attributor's report goes on to show that official sites receive lower search engine rankings until they receive links from copying sites.

"Our research highlights the complex aspects of the content economy. Once their original content has been placed online, publishers have no visibility into how and where that content is being used," said Jim Brock, Attributor's CEO. "The lyrics research demonstrates the role search engines play in rewarding copied content. As monetization of content increasingly happens off-site, publishers need tools like Attributor to capture full value for their content."

Methodology

Attributor fed lyrics of 14 songs into its system in mid-September and analyzed the results after three weeks. The list represented the top songs from across various genres on Billboard Online.

The songs included: Umbrella (Rihanna), Before He Cheats (Carrie Underwood), Big Girls Don't Cry (Fergie), Bleed it Out (Linkin Park), Beautiful Girls (Sean Kingston), You Can't Stop the Beat (Hairspray Soundtrack), Can't Tell Me Nothing (Kanye West), The Pretender (Foo Fighters), Stronger (Kanye West), Plies (Shawty), I Get Money (50 Cent), Let it Go (Keyshia Cole), Ayo Technology (50 Cent) and Good Life (Kanye West).

A full copy of the research report can be found on the Attributor blog.

ABOUT ATTRIBUTOR

Attributor is a privately held technology company that provides transparency and accountability to publishers of all media types across the Internet. Attributor's platform empowers publishers to track their content, understand how it is used and profit from its distribution through Web-wide content monitoring and analysis. Attributor is headquartered in Redwood City, Calif. and can be found online at http://www.attributor.com.