Why We’ve Sued Musixmatch and The Private Equity Owner That Runs It

When we launched LyricFind over 20 years ago, the company was just three friends straight out of university looking to solve one of digital music’s early problems: the lack of complete, accurate, licensed lyrics on the internet. Our initial licensing deals established that there was a market for digital lyrics and created a new revenue stream for songwriters and music publishers. Since then, we’ve worked diligently to build on that initial idea, adding more than 12 million songs to our lyrics catalog and innovating on technologies including lyrics synchronization, translations, lyric videos and more. Most importantly, we facilitated over $25M in payments to songwriters and music publishers in 2024 alone, always respecting the fundamental rights of music creators.

Over the years, we’ve enjoyed watching the digital lyrics space grow and evolve, with healthy competition keeping us on our toes and resulting in better products across the board. This competitive atmosphere has led to more money for rightsholders and a better experience for music fans, as all lyric companies must deliver both a great lyric product and the best return for songwriters.

Recently, however, Musixmatch – joined and guided by its private equity owner – have engaged in certain tactics that we believe are destroying the market we all love for their own financial gain.

Last March, Musixmatch signed a deal with Warner-Chappell that gave Musixmatch not only the exclusive rights to sub-license Warner-Chappell lyrics, but also to provide the lyric data itself to third parties. That exclusivity applies even if those third parties have acquired a lyric license directly from Warner-Chappell (including existing direct licenses). This exclusive extends to works that are controlled in whole or in part by Warner Chappell, so publishers who co-control works with Warner-Chappell will be impacted and see an immediate drop in their revenue from LyricFind as that content becomes blocked. As part of the exclusivity, Warner-Chappell informed us that “all DSPs/partners can only source [Warner] lyrics from [Musixmatch] and would need to remove lyric data from other sources.”. This would seem to indicate that DSPs would not even be able to use lyrics provided by co-publishers, artists, or even lyrics they transcribed themselves.

What does this mean? It means that Musixmatch is now effectively the gatekeeper to any DSP that wants to have a complete lyric offering. There is simply no way around having to work with Musixmatch, because even with a direct license from Warner-Chappell, a DSP will still have to source the lyric data from Musixmatch. And that’s not just a hypothetical – it’s exactly what happened with Spotify last year, who had completed onboarding with LyricFind but were robbed on the opportunity to select the lyric provider of its choice.

Spotify was likely just the first – so we are taking action now to protect every music streaming service’s right to partner with the lyric provider of their choice.

And it’s not just DSPs that are negatively affected. We believe that Musixmatch’s conduct may have rippling effects on nearly all participants in the music industry:

Independent Artists: Musixmatch already requires independent artists and songwriters to pay for Musixmatch Pro in order to get their lyrics on Spotify and Instagram (LyricFind has never charged artists for lyric distribution). Without competition, how high will that price go? In addition, DSPs may not even be able to accept lyrics directly from artists, labels, and digital distributors for their own recordings if they cover Warner-Chappell works without violating the Musixmatch exclusivity.

Music Publishers: Independent songwriters and music publishers may be disproportionately impacted. Without competition, Musixmatch could potentially lower their royalty payments as much as they wish, as there will be no other option to get lyrics on to music streaming services and other DSPs. And without an alternative for collecting lyric revenues, their earnings could plummet.

Other Lyric Providers: Aside from LyricFind, companies like Genius also provide lyric data to DSPs. For example, Apple Music sources lyric data from Musixmatch, Genius, and their own internal lyric creation teams. Given what we’ve been told so far, this would seem to imply that even Apple would be forced to delete Warner-Chappell lyrics acquired from all sources other than Musixmatch and replace them with Musixmatch lyrics at, what we allege will be, monopoly pricing.

Unsurprisingly, this all seems to be driven by the classic private equity playbook. Musixmatch is owned by TPG Growth, a giant private equity firm. LyricFind has never taken institutional money. As a result, we’ve always been able to do what we believe is best for music publishers and songwriters, not necessarily what’s best for the investor’s bottom line in the short term.

We’ve spent the last year trying to resolve this issue amicably, as Canadians tend to do. Suffice it to say, Musixmatch has not responded to our concerns in any meaningful way.

Today, we’re standing up to them on behalf of ourselves and the broader digital music community. You can read the complete filing here.

Sincerely,

Darryl Ballantyne
Founder & CEO
LyricFind