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The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically be
by EdgeExplorer 11mo ago
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
- fosk 11mo agoThey probably fear a domino effect if they let go of this. And so they defend it vehemently to avoid setting a precedent. Think about compositions, samples, performance rights, and so on. There is a lot more at stake.
- DANmode 11mo agoHot take: it’s all bullshit. Like software patents - when you’re not a normie.
- ajuc 11mo agoWhat's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art? We'll only get the art that artists really wanted to make? Great!
- verzali 11mo agoWhat's the benefit of getting paid for your work? We'll only get the work people really want to do? Great!
- ajuc 11mo agoArt existed before IP rights. Artists did get paid.
- vkou 11mo ago> What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art? What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to software? What's the benefit of consolidating all meaningful access to computing services to a few trillion-dollar gate-keeping corpos?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- freejazz 11mo agoIt's a good decision because it must be an incredible minority of people who only listen to music when the lyrics can be displayed. I'd imagine most people aren't even looking at the music playing app while listening to music. Regardless, they are copyrighted and they get license fees from parties that do license them and they make money that way. Likely much more money than they would make from the streams they are losing from you.
- slaymaker1907 11mo agoI think it depends on the music. Most people will have a greatly improved experience when listening to opera if they have access to (translated) lyrics. Even if you know the language of an opera, it can be extremely difficult for a lot of people to understand the lyrics due to all the ornamentation.
- freejazz 11mo agoWhat percentage of streaming income does opera, as a genre, represent such that it could even factor into this business decision?
- griffzhowl 11mo agoI think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that. Plus, from TFA, "GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with OpenAI on how copyright holders can be remunerated." Getting something back is better than nothing
- griffzhowl 11mo agoHad a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA
- ToucanLoucan 11mo agoLikely because you're a "luddite" which in the current atmosphere of HN and other tech spaces, mean you have a problem with a "research institution" which has a separate for-profit enterprise face that it wears when it feels like it having free and open access to the collected works of humanity so it can create a plagiarism machine that it can then charge for people to access. I don't respect this opinion but it is unfortunately infesting tech spaces right now.
- fwn 11mo ago> Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? While I do not agree with your take, FWIW I found your comment substantive and constructive. You seem to be making two points that are both controversial: The first is that generative AI makes the availability of lyrics more problematic, given new kinds of reuse and transformation it enables. The second is that AI companies owe something (legally or morally) to lyric rights holders, and that it is better to have some mechanism for compensation, even if the details are not ideal. I personally do not believe that AI training is meaningfully different from traditional data analysis, which has long been accepted and rarely problematized. While I understand that reproducing original lyrics raises copyright issues, this should only be a concern in terms of reproduction, not analysis. Example: Even if you do no data analysis at all and your random character generator publishes the lyrics of a famous Beatles song (or other forbidden numbers) by sheer coincidence, it would still be a copyright issue. I also do not believe in selective compensation schemes driven by legal events. If a legitimate mechanism for rights holders cannot be constructed in general, it is poor policy craftsmanship to privilege the music industry specifically. Doing so relieves the pressure to find a universal solution once powerful stakeholders are satisfied. While this might be seen as setting a useful precedent by small-scale creators, I doubt it will help them.
- lokar 11mo agoThe composition and lyrics are owned separately from the recorded performance.
- slaymaker1907 11mo agoI'm pretty sure you could even have lyrics with a separate copyright from the composition itself. For example, you can clearly have lyrics without the music and you can have the composition alone in the case that it is performed as an instrumental cover or something.
- EnPissant 11mo agoThis is a tough one for the HN crowd. It's like that man not sure which button to push meme. 1) RIAA is evil for enforcing copyrights on lyrics? 2) OpenAI is evil for training on lyrics?
- maximilianburke 11mo agoI think you mean the RIAA RAII is a different kind of (necessary) evil
- EnPissant 11mo agoIndeed, too much C++. Edited.
- slaymaker1907 11mo agoWhy not both? As the GP mentioned, lyrics are also invaluable for people besides training for AI.
- nomel 11mo agoI think the perceived lack-of-value for them is related to how easy it is to write lyrics down, compared to any other aspect of the music. Anyone can do it within the time of the song, usually first try. Any other aspect of the song cant't just be written down from ear (yes, including the sheet music, which isn't nearly expressive enough to reproduce a performance*). *There are some funny "play from sheet music without knowing the song" type videos out there, with funny results. YouTube/google search is no longe usable, so I can't find any.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 11mo agoActually in Germany it's GEMA
- briandear 11mo ago
- saghm 11mo agoOne amusing part of lyrics on Spotify to me is how they don't seem to track which songs are instrumentals or not and use that to skip the message about them not knowing the lyrics. An instrumental will pop up and it will say something like "Sorry, we don't have the lyrics to this one yet". The only thing funnier than that is when they do have the lyrics to a song that probably doesn't need them, like Hocus Pocus by Focus: https://open.spotify.com/track/2uzyiRdvfNI5WxUiItv1y9?si=7a7ed855813b4e12 https://open.spotify.com/track/2uzyiRdvfNI5WxUiItv1y9?si=7a7...
- smelendez 11mo agoI’ve also seen cases where they list lyrics for a song that doesn’t have any (usually an instrumental jazz version of an old standard).
- input_sh 11mo agoOh they track that, it's in their API as the "instrumentalness" score: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-audio-features https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc... The fact that they don't do anything with that information is unrelated.
- saghm 11mo agoInteresting, especially that it's a probability rather than a boolean! The line can be blurry sometimes (like in the example I mentioned), so it makes sense that it might not be possible to come up with a consistent way of classifying them that everyone would agree with.
- rpdillon 11mo agoThe content industries should have been the ones to invent LLMs, but their head is so stuck in the past and in regressive thinking about how they protect their revenue streams that they're incapable of innovating. Publishing houses should have been the ones to have researchers looking into how to computationally leverage their enormous corpus of data. But instead, they put zero dollars into actual research and development and paid the lawyers instead. And so it leads to attitudes like this.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 11mo ago“The content industries.” Why would people invest in destroying what they love?
- rpdillon 11mo agoThere is no destruction.
- sam_lowry_ 11mo agoHe meant, the stream of free money from unsuspecting monkeys.
- gruez 11mo agoThat's always been the case, eg. how they were latecomers to streaming.
- cubefox 11mo agoStreaming had to compete with digital music piracy. As a result, Spotify is impossibly cheap compared to buying individual albums or singles in the past. So musicians hardly receive any money from recorded music anymore. Nowadays they basically have only concerts left as a means to earn money.
- ghssds 11mo agoThe only people seeing themselves as "content creators" are people giving social media stuff so their users get something they can doom scroll. Other people see themselves as artists, entertainers, musicians, authors, etc.
- riazrizvi 11mo agoThoughts by someone who doesn’t make a living by songs? I’m guessing you’d want to restrict lyrics to encourage more plays of the song by people who are motivated to understand them. Along with the artist’s appreciation of that experience of extracting what you’re fascinated by. Burdensome processes generate love and connection to things. Not everything is a functional commodity to be used and discarded at whim.