This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply. The Wall Street Journal: Genius Media Group Inc. depends on Google’s search engine to send music lovers to its website stocked with hard-to-decipher lyrics to hip-hop songs and other pop hits. Now Genius says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site. […] Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.” Expand - View Original
Of course they buried the important paragraph at the bottom: Doesn't matter how much work they put into ensuring accuracy of the transcriptions. There's no "sweat of the brow" protection.
This has been pretty apparent for a while now. I've seen the same errors in lyrics show up in Google results and on Genius several times. Unfortunately, nothing really to do about it, it's just shady, not illegal.
I'm really curious how this one plays out... not from the stealing the content per se but the fact that google is killing site's hits and visits. They do the same thing with Wiki.
Yeah this is fascinating to me too. Ultimately, since the lyrics are copyrighted material, I’m curious what pull Genius has in this case. They basically republish others’ copyrighted work. Furthermore, the lyrics are almost always incorrect. I like that Apple Music has the lyrics function baked in, but when the lyrics are usually wrong, it doesn’t help.
Glad you mentioned it. Google pulls the top relevant info from any site. Just do any “how do I...” search and it’ll pull from any numbers of places without having to actually go to the site. Just did it for how to change a tire, a little summary is taken right from Bridgestone.com. Seems like the tip of a larger argument.