Most people have seen lyrics displayed on Amazon Music, Google, or Apple Music without ever thinking about how they got there, or who gets paid when they appear. LyricFind is the company that built that infrastructure. We sat down with Robert Singerman, LyricFind’s SVP of International Publishing, to talk about the history of the company, how the money flows, what Africa’s music industry is missing, and why he has spent over two decades trying to give music subtitles.
I started a very long time ago, in high school, promoting concerts. Then in university as well. I booked and promoted concerts pretty much from the first semester. I did not know I was going to go into it professionally. I just loved music and had the opportunity when I was in high school to bring my favourite band there. It was a big success. Everybody loved it. I made money for the three schools involved.
When I got out of university, I started working in two very disparate fields of the music business. One was traditional English, Irish, and French folk music, and the other was avant-garde jazz. I was essentially an agent and manager, building touring and recording capacities for artists I really believed in. That was in 1978.
I continued as an agent and manager over the years, working with everything from world music, before it was even called world music, to new wave acts. I had the honour of representing King Sunny Ade on his first tours of America, and I worked with Fela Kuti at one point, although he got put in jail and his son Femi (age 10) headlined the Hollywood Bowl gig with Egypt 80. I also booked James Brown at one of the lowest points of his career, helping bring him back to prominence. That period culminated in the film Living in America. I represented R.E.M., Violent Femmes, and 10,000 Maniacs, as well as many artists across multiple genres.
At a certain point, I decided to become a consultant, working on a fixed rate rather than a speculative percentage basis. I was one of the first people in the music business to use that model. Then, in 2000, my family moved to Paris, and I started working with artists in France, including Yannick Noah. I was also given the opportunity to run the European Music Office and the French Music Export Office in North America.
That role is actually what led me to the idea that became my life’s work. If you really want to promote European music in America, you need to give music subtitles. You need audiences to understand what the lyrics are about. Otherwise, you might have one or two novelty hits in a different language, but you are never going to have artists’ careers be globally successful. Memory is stored where text and information are stored in the brain, and music is stored in another place. It is the flashing between those two places that makes music great and memorable at the same time. So, back in 2004, I started on my own path towards giving music legal lyric translations globally, which led to YouTube’s closed captioning, Deezer and many other platforms are now using legal lyric translations, or language conversions for meaning.
LyricFind created the online lyrics market. The founders actually started it during their studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada. One of them was looking for lyrics online, could not find them, and they built a lyrics website. They did not even realise what they were doing was not legal until companies approached them to sublicense, and they started looking into the laws. That is actually how it started.
The real turning point came when Microsoft called and said, “If you can license this, we will use your lyrics.” So Darryl Ballantyne, the CEO, called Ted Cohen at EMI. Ted said he could help get the major publishers on board, and that is how the business model was born. Darryl went on to build LyricFind with his co-founder Mohamed Moutadayne instead of going back to EMI to work for Ted.
The model is simple: we license lyrics from music publishers, and then we provide those licences to platforms, DSPs, search engines, car manufacturers, phone companies, health care facilities, whoever wants to display lyrics legally. Lyrics are traditionally 50% of the value of a song. The music is the other 50%. So over the last 21 years, as the music business has shifted from physical to digital, we have built the infrastructure that ensures that value gets captured and paid out.
Our main clients currently include Google, TikTok, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Xperi, Deezer, and Pandora. We work with about 100 platforms globally. We also acquired a company called Rotor Videos in 2023, which allows any artist, manager, label, or distributor to create lyric videos, music videos, visualisers, Spotify Canvas, Apple Music Album Motion, and TikTok and Instagram assets quickly and inexpensively, with access to a library of about 15 million cleared clips.
So we have a licence from CAPASSO, the South African collecting society, which covers the broader African repertoire. CAPASSO is claiming on behalf of Nigerian music, and we are paying CAPASSO, and CAPASSO is paying their sister societies. So, Nigerian repertoire should be paid through South Africa as an intermediary.
We have been trying to work directly with COSON in Nigeria, but have not been successful yet, mainly because their song data has not been sufficient. We need song data to know which songs to claim and who to pay. Metadata is the key to getting paid. If the metadata is accurate and the societies are paying properly, Nigerian songwriters should be receiving royalties.
We do not have any specifically African DSP clients yet, although we have been in conversations with some for a long time. The global services like Google Search are in Africa, and their users are in Africa. But the local services have to be willing to pay a fair price for lyric displays, and so far, that negotiation has not been concluded successfully.
It is actually straightforward. You can go to lyricfind.com/vap. There is a verified artist platform where artists can submit lyrics directly. However, I would strongly encourage every songwriter who wants to get paid for lyric displays to do more than just submit. They need to make sure they have a proper licensing arrangement.
If you go through CAPASSO or your local society, you should be able to get paid that way. Another option is HFA, the Harry Fox Agency, which is the mechanical rights society in the US. It is free to opt in, and it is a no-commission deal. Alternatively, many digital distributors collect lyric exhibition rights in their terms and conditions and pass those rights along to us, and we pay them royalties, which are passed along to songwriters.
The critical thing is: do not give your lyric exhibition rights to two different parties. If there is a conflict, the money is held until the conflict is resolved. And that can often take time.
If you are a publisher with a decent-sized catalogue, you can contact me directly at [email protected]. And check rotorvideos.com if you are an artist who needs video assets. It is genuinely a remarkable deal right now, unlimited video creation for less than $240 USD a year (and less if you’re using it through LyricFind’s Verified Artist Platform!).
It is all three, honestly. Many large language models (LLMs) have been built on licensed material, but in most cases, they have not actually been licensed so far. That is starting to change. Anthropic lost a significant lawsuit in the book publishing space, and every major book publisher can now collect from them because they infringed on copyrights by including published books in their LLM training data without permission. The same principle is playing out across music. Some suits have been settled, but most have not yet.
I believe that ultimately, AI will have to properly license music on both the input side, which goes into training the model, and the output side, which is generated. That is a massive potential revenue stream for publishing and master copyright owners. Whether it actually happens that way remains to be seen. The courts and governments still need to decide.
What I do know is that the lyric side is actually easier to verify than the music side when it comes to AI provenance. If a lyric, which is essentially just text, can be shown to have a high probability of coming from a particular song, then some form of fractional payment should be possible. We actually wrote a Canadian grant application around this concept, proposing to use our database to reverse-engineer where AI-generated lyrics might have originated. We did not win the grant, but the idea stands.
I remain hopeful that governments and courts will protect the value of human creation over prompt creation and button-pressing. Technology has always been a disruptor. Synthesisers disrupted piano players. AI is disrupting translators. Real songs coming from an authentic human place – devotional songs, storytelling songs, songs that mean something – I do not believe those will disappear. But the industry needs to be proactive about protecting the economic foundation that allows those songs to be made.
On the business side, we are focused on expanding our presence on global DSPs, as well as our relationships with radio networks, television, car manufacturers, and any platform that understands the value of lyrics. Lyric translations specifically are moving from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have faster than most people realise. The ability to understand a song in your own language, regardless of what language it was written in, is where everything is heading.
Another way LyricFind is working in Africa is through Rotor Videos, now being integrated into ToneGrid, a Nigerian-based music supply chain aggregator that enables labels and distributors to deliver and manage content across major DSPs. ToneGrid is offering visual tools to create Spotify Canvas, Apple Music Album Motion, music videos, lyric videos, lyric translation videos, and short-form videos.
On Africa specifically, I have done webinars with music academies in Nigeria and have spoken with CMO representatives from various African countries, but I have never actually been to an African music conference or been able to properly present LyricFind and lyric translations to the African market. So I genuinely appreciate this conversation and hope it reaches people who need to hear it.
My preference would always be to work as directly as possible with Nigerian publishers, rights holders, and distributors. If a Nigerian CMO or publisher can send us proper song data and claims, we can pay directly. The technology exists to make that work. The challenge is that many African CMOs are not yet set up to do that.
What I would say to anyone in the Nigerian music industry reading this: your lyrics have value. Every time they are displayed on Google, on Amazon Music, on Deezer, on any platform we work with, that is a licensing event, and there is money attached to it. Make sure your metadata is accurate, make sure your lyrics are in our system, and make sure your rights are registered with someone who can actually collect on your behalf. The money is there. It just needs a clear path to reach you.
