By Robert McMillan
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.
Google denies wrongdoing. Still, Genius's complaints offer a
window into the challenges small tech companies can face when the
unit of Alphabet Inc. starts offering competing services on its
platform.
The complaints come amid mounting concerns over the business
practices of Google and other tech giants. The Wall Street Journal
recently reported that the Justice Department is gearing up for a
new antitrust probe into the search company.
Genius said it notified Google as far back as 2017, and again in
an April letter, that copied transcriptions appear on Google's
website. The April letter, a copy of which was viewed by the
Journal, warned that reuse of Genius's transcriptions breaks the
Genius.com terms of service and violates antitrust law.
"Over the last two years, we've shown Google irrefutable
evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied
from Genius," said Ben Gross, Genius's chief strategy officer, in
an email message. The company said it used a watermarking system in
its lyrics that embedded patterns in the formatting of apostrophes.
Genius said it found more than 100 examples of songs on Google that
came from its 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."
In a written statement, Google said the lyrics on its site,
which pop up in little search-result squares called "information
panels," are licensed from partners, not created by Google.
"We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold
our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement,"
Google said.
After this article was published online Sunday, Google issued a
second statement to say it was investigating the issue raised by
Genius and would terminate its agreements with partners who were
"not upholding good practices."
In 2016, Google forged a partnership with LyricFind, a Canadian
company that secures deals with music publishers allowing companies
such as Google to publish lyrics online. LyricFind Chief Executive
Darryl Ballantyne said in an email that his company creates lyrics
using its own content team. "We do not source lyrics from Genius,"
he said.
Google's information boxes are part of the company's continuing
effort to provide users with direct answers to their queries on
results pages, particularly on mobile devices. The company says the
boxes provide users with a better experience.
It also means Google is directing a smaller share of those
queries to other sites. In March, 62% of mobile searches on Google
didn't result in a user clicking through to another website,
according to the web-analytics firm Jumpshot Inc.
Google previously has disrupted companies' business models by
switching from referring traffic via search to providing services
directly on Google websites. Google Maps increasingly competes with
local-business listing service Yelp Inc., and Google's forays into
travel and shopping services have taken traffic from online
retailers and travel sites, said Rand Fishkin, chief executive of
SparkToro LLC, a web-marketing software company.
As a result, clicks to web publishers have been dropping on
desktop search, Mr. Fishkin said. Desktop searches end without a
click to another website about 35% of the time. That is up about 9%
since 2016, according to Jumpshot.
Genius is a privately held company, and its investors include
Andreessen Horowitz, the rapper Nas and Quicken Loans Inc. founder
Dan Gilbert. The company doesn't disclose revenue but says its ad
business runs to tens of millions of dollars a year. It also earns
money by providing lyrics and facts about songs that it publishes
and licenses under agreement with music publishers.
Genius clients include the music-streaming website Spotify
Technology SA and Apple Inc. Genius also earns money through
different initiatives, including advertising and sponsored videos
on YouTube.
Genius first became suspicious about the source of Google's
lyrics in 2016, when a Genius software engineer spotted something
odd about the song "Panda," a hit by rapper Desiigner. While many
lyrics sites had published error-ridden transcriptions of
Desiigner's hard-to-understand lyrics, Genius had the definitive
version because Desiigner himself provided his lyrics to the site,
Genius said.
"We noticed that Google's lyrics matched our lyrics down to the
character," Genius's Mr. Gross said.
The Journal randomly chose three of the more than 100 examples
Genius says it found of songs on Google containing these
watermarks, and verified the pattern of apostrophes was the
same.
Because Genius doesn't itself own the copyright on the lyrics in
question, the company might have a weak hand in any legal dispute
with Google, said Daphne Keller, a former Google lawyer who now
studies the regulation of technology platforms at Stanford's Center
for Internet and Society.
"But it's totally understandable why they don't want this
happening, and I imagine Google doesn't want it happening either,"
she said.
Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 16, 2019 18:56 ET (22:56 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Aug 2024 to Sep 2024
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2023 to Sep 2024