LyricFind has amended its ongoing lawsuit against rival lyrics aggregator Musixmatch. This is part of the falling out between the two big lyric aggregators following Musixmatch’s exclusivity deal with music publisher Warner Chappell.
LyricFind argues that deal was anticompetitive, claiming it was designed to scupper a deal it was negotiating with Spotify, a Musixmatch client, because Warner’s exclusivity arrangement with Musixmatch effectively locked out Lyricfind from being able to operate on an equal footing.
The revised lawsuit now includes allegations that Musixmatch also tried to strike similar exclusivity agreements with other parties. It also asks the court to force Musixmatch to not only compensate LyricFind, but to additionally hand over any money it has made as a result of its allegedly anticompetitive conduct, including by selling subscriptions to its Musixmatch Pro service.
In a statement, LyricFind says the amendments have been made based on information pulled from documents gathered in relation to the dispute - information which, it reckons, has “further strengthened our existing legal claims”.
Reviewing those documents, the company’s lawyers add, has delivered “several pieces of highly inculpatory evidence” that “directly substantiate” previous claims and “leaves little doubt as to the anticompetitive nature of defendants’ conduct”.
Both LyricFind and Musixmatch aggregate and license lyrics from across the music industry, and then provide those lyrics and accompanying services to streaming and other digital platforms. Traditionally aggregators have all secured licences from the same publishers and then competed to secure relationships with clients based on the products and services they can provide around those lyrics.
However, when Musixmatch entered into an exclusivity deal with Warner Chappell, that meant LyricFind couldn’t include lyrics owned or co-owned by the publisher into its offer to streaming services.
LyricFind claims that Musixmatch struck its exclusivity deal with Warner because it knew Spotify, one of its biggest clients, was considering a move to LyricFind. By locking LyricFind out from access to Warner’s lyrics, Musixmatch engineered an outcome that meant Spotify dropped its plans to change its lyrics provider.
The amended lawsuit says that while Musixmatch’s Warner Chappell exclusivity deal achieved its “anticompetitive goal”, the company’s efforts to secure such an exclusivity arrangement “were not limited to Warner Chappell”.
That section of the revised legal filing is then heavily redacted, so we don't know what other exclusivity deals Musixmatch was trying to do. However, the new filing insists that those other efforts to secure exclusivity deals “underscore the anticompetitive nature” of the Warner deal and “its lack of any legitimate, procompetitive rationale”.
LyricFind wants the court to force Musixmatch to pay its rival damages to compensate for the deals it lost as a result of all this anticompetitive conduct, not least the Spotify deal. However, the new legal filing also stresses that Musixmatch has profited from its allegedly bad conduct in other ways than just securing deals that might otherwise have gone to LyricFind.
That includes the extra income it makes from its Musixmatch Pro service. According to LyricFind, that’s a subscription service that “purportedly helps independent songwriters and publishers get their lyrics on major streaming platforms”.
The subscription service is “responsible for a substantial share of Musixmatch’s total revenue and profit on an annual basis”, LyricFind claims. And, if it had lost its Spotify partnership, and therefore its “ability to ensure lyric availability on Spotify”, the revenue generated from Musixmatch Pro would have been “substantially reduced”.
To that end, LyricFind wants the court to force ‘non-restitutionary disgorgement’ onto Musixmatch, which would basically force it to hand over any money generated by its anticompetitive conduct, not just the money that would have otherwise ended up with LyricFind had it scored its Spotify deal.
This back and forth has now been going on for some time, with neither LyricFind nor Musixmatch pulling their punches in their legal filings. Musixmatch has been particularly scathing of LyricFind’s claims throughout the face off, so presumably we can expect another similarly scathing response to this amended lawsuit.