MetroLyrics

» see metrolyrics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i remember metrolyrics from the broadband window. it was one of those sites that you ended up on every time you wanted the actual words to a song. you typed a fragment of a chorus into google, and metrolyrics was usually in the top three results above azlyrics and below genius. it was not the place anyone went to deliberately. it was the place google sent you when you needed to check whether you had been singing a line right for years.

the site started in december 2002 in vancouver. milun tesovic and alan juristovski built it as a side project that grew into a small canadian business with a licensing twist. metrolyrics paid licensing fees to copyright holders and showed ads against the lyrics, so the publishers and songwriters got royalties from page views. that was unusual at the time. most lyrics sites in the early 2000s were scrapers running outside the licensing system, and the music publishers' association of america was suing several of them.

cbs interactive bought metrolyrics in 2011, folding it into a portfolio that already included cnet, gamespot, last.fm and tv.com. for a decade after the acquisition the site sat quietly inside cbs, ran its ads, paid its royalties and kept its top-three google ranking. in 2020 red ventures bought the cnet media group out of cbs viacom for half a billion dollars. on june 29 2021, less than a year after the deal closed, metrolyrics went offline. nobody at red ventures explained why, then or since.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

metrolyrics' growth came from two simple things. the first was that they were one of the few lyrics sites that paid for what they published, which meant they could partner with publishers and have lyrics available with chord charts and annotated metadata where everyone else was hosting txt files copy-pasted from forums. the second was seo. metrolyrics took search-engine ranking seriously from very early, and their pages were structured so that the chorus of a song would land in google's snippet block without any scrolling.

by the late 2000s the site had become the de facto first stop for english-language lyrics search outside of azlyrics. cbs interactive's 2011 acquisition price was not disclosed but the deal was reportedly in the eight-figure range, which was respectable for a lyrics site at that point in the cycle.

~ the decline ~

genius arrived in 2009 under the name rap genius and raised real venture money in 2014. it gradually turned itself into the structured-annotation home for hip-hop and then for almost everything else. by the time cbs was preparing to sell off the cnet media group, metrolyrics was no longer where the lyrics conversation was happening. the licensed-database business that had been its moat had been replaced by a community-annotation product that gave readers reasons to come back beyond just checking a chorus.

red ventures, the company that bought cnet from cbs in october 2020, makes most of its money from financial-services and consumer-product affiliate revenue. a lyrics site with no clear path to a high-cpm vertical was not a property red ventures was set up to operate. the june 2021 shutdown looks, like a portfolio cleanup decision rather than a product collapse.

~ the day it died ~

metrolyrics did not get a goodbye. the site was reachable on the morning of june 29 2021 and unreachable by that evening. no shutdown notice ran on the homepage. no farewell post landed in the press. archive.org's last full crawl of the site is from late june 2021, and after that the domain serves a generic error page.

tesovic, the cofounder, posted on his own twitter that he had not been involved with the site for years and did not know why red ventures had pulled the plug without an announcement. the larger reaction from the music-press side was a small mention in the verge and a few archive-team threads on reddit. for a site that had served lyrics to a quarter of a billion people, the exit was unusually invisible.

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