musiXmatch raises $3.7 million for lyrics

Italian company develops an API for lyrics and other metadata for music services to offer consumers

Everyone has done it. You can’t really tell what the singer is saying, even though it’s one of your favorite songs, so you head to Google and type in something like “till the world ends lyrics.” The results always return bountiful (but lackluster) and somewhat accurate (but surrounded by spam). And there’s rarely a clean way to integrate those lyrics into your song files’ metadata.

Here’s a startup that believes there’s a better way.

musiXmatch, developer of a digital lyrics API, announced Monday that it has has raised $3.7 million in Series A funding from leading investor Francesco Micheli Associati (FMA), a private Italian-based fund managed by Francesco Micheli and Carlo Micheli.

While it’s not a consumer-facing service, musiXmatch offers third parties an API they can integrate into their own online music services to add a rich volume of metadata to song files. Besides lyrics, the API brings in data about the performing artist, genre, influences, related artists and more. All of the company’s music metadata and lyrics are officially licensed from partners like BMG, Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony ATV Music and many more.

It’s a huge market. Those Google searches we all run on song lyrics add up fast. In fact, “lyrics” has been the second most popular search query on Google since the company started collecting data in 2004. (The number one search query: “facebook.”)

But Google shouldn't be the best solution for finding lyrics. Writes CEO and founder Max Ciociola on the musiXmatch Blog:

Some skeptics have raised the question: “Why should developers even use a Lyrics API, when the lyrics are already on Google?“ 

Our response has always been: 

”It’s inconvenient for users to search for Lyrics on Google“ 

Users want to have the most up to date lyrics perfectly matched to their music library. Instantly.

When you look at the fact that 10% of Google’s searches are music related and 70% of music queries are Lyrics related, you begin to understand the extent of the problem.

Today, musiXmatch claims to be the largest official lyrics database in the world, with over 5.3 million entries.

Ciociola says musiXmatch will use the new funding to further develop its API and to expand its distribution and content localization efforts in Asia and the U.S. The company will also be opening its first stateside office and hiring engineers.