Celebrating its 20th year, LyricFind pioneered lyric licensing and is now the global premier provider of lyric data, sync, and translations, with novel solutions for data analysis and video creation.
LyricFind is the trusted source for lyrics and data licensing. Currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, the company pioneered the lyric licensing market in 2005, when it signed the first-ever lyric licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing (now part of Sony/ATV Music Publishing). Since then, it has grown to become the world leader in lyric monetization, all while remaining completely independent with zero outside funding.
Straight Outta Ontario
Founded in 2004 by CEO Darryl Ballantyne, CTO Mohamed Moutadayne, and Board of Directors member Chris Book, LyricFind grew out of conversations in the University of Waterloo dorms about the co-founders’ desire to solve the problem of finding complete and accurate lyrics online. In those early days of digital music, no one else saw the value in aggregating rights and content for the use of lyrics on the internet.
After signing the EMI deal, LyricFind landed their first client, Real Networks, in 2006. Today, the company continues to expand its rights, content, products, and team, with over 100 employees, partnerships with over 60,000 publishers, licenses for over 200,000 publishing catalogues, and a worldwide client list including top music platforms such as TikTok, Amazon, Google, Xperi, YouTube, Pandora, Deezer, and more.
What Is LyricFind?
Clients trust LyricFind to provide current, accurate, and fully licensed lyrics, and its in-house premium reporting infrastructure precisely tracks and pays royalties to songwriters and rights-holders on a song-by-song and territory-by-territory basis. LyricFind’s solutions also include LyricIQ, a set of innovative data analysis and filtering tools, and Videos by LyricFind, a platform that generates videos in seconds.
Beyond Words
Other major company milestones include acquiring Gracenote’s lyric service in 2013, teaming with Billboard in 2015 to launch the LyricFind U.S. and LyricFind Global charts, partnering with The Recording Academy in 2016 to license lyrics for the Grammys, and integrating with Google to add lyrics to search in 2016. In 2023, LyricFind completed the acquisition of Belfast-based company Rotor Videos, strengthening LyricFind’s well-established portfolio of lyric-based solutions and expanding on its recent push into the video creation market.
Today, LyricFind’s product suite is the global premier provider of lyric data, sync, and translations, with innovative solutions for data analysis and video creation. These include lyric videos, music videos and visualizers, Spotify Canvas, Apple Motion Art, album art videos, and social media videos.