In the past few years, streaming services have become recorded music's brightest spot of revenue growth. Last year, revenue from subscription and streaming services rose 51 percent to top $1 billion for the first time, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Those sales countered a slide in sales of physical goods such as CDs and a slight decline in digital music download revenue.
Lyrics videos have ridden the same wave.
YouTube said that it hosted about two days worth of lyrics-video content -- clips with "official audio" in the title -- in the first 8 months of 2011. In the same period this year, that amount jumped to 81 days, accounting for 590 million views this year alone. Searches for "official audio" and "lyric video" have skyrocketed. Vevo, the online music-video service partly owned by major labels and YouTube itself, had fewer than 400 lyrics videos in its library through the end of 2012. Now it has five times as many.
For its Video Music Awards in August, MTV picked "Best Lyric Video" as its socially selected award category, in which fans could determine the winner by voting through Twitter, Vine or Instagram. The previous year, when the category was "Best Song of the Summer," MTV received 11.8 million votes. This year, the network received 166.2 million votes for the top lyric video.
Rhyme and reasonSo why are lyrics videos so popular? The format is as old as music videos themselves, with Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" as a landmark, early example.
For labels, it's a way to keep people listening to the official product on a platform that would otherwise be flooded with unsanctioned alternatives. Lyric videos have become the standard video release to coincide with an audio track's availability, serving as a placeholder until the official, high-budget version can be produced. In cases like Katy Perry, some lyrics clips are generating more views than their big-budget counterparts.
