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.com 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 doing anything nefarious. 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 Department of Justice 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 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 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.
In 2016, Google partnered with LyricFind Inc., 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 ongoing
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's up about 9%
since 2016, according to Jumpshot.
Genius is a privately held company, and its investors include
Andreessen Horowitz, Emagen Investment Group and the rapper Nas.
The company doesn't disclose revenues but says its ad business runs
to tens of millions of dollars per 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 makes 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. A Desiigner representative
didn't respond to an email message.
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 may 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 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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