Do recording artists have to pay more money to have their lyrics printed in the liner notes? Aside from the extra printing costs, because the rights to the lyrics are administered by a third-party company (ASCAP, BMI?) do they have to in effect, buy them from themselves using a middleman?
I’ve always wondered why relatively few artists include lyrics.
capn
It doesn’t cost money, per se – the muscians have the right to print their own lyrics (they hold copyright, which lets them do whatever they want with them). There can be issues if they’re doing cover songs, but usually they are paying the songwriter for the songs otherwise (though I have seen these left out of the printing of lyrics).
More likely, adding lyrics adds production costs to the CD. You can’t fit them all on a single square, so the cost of printing and packaging goes up. Not by a lot, but even a penny a CD adds up if you’re selling 500,000 copies.
I’ve heard of artists (sorry, can’t remember specific examples) who don’t want their lyrics printed because they don’t want them to stand alone: the words have to be heard in the context of the music to be appreciated.
anecdotal: I remember hearing a sound byte years ago on the radio, from Trisha Yearwood about her recently released greatest hits album, ‘songbook.’ Basically, she pushed hard to get the full lyrics to every song printed in the liner notes, (which was apparently very unusual for a greatest hits disc and the label execs didn’t want to go along with it at first.) “Because this album is a tribute to the songwriters I’ve worked with over the years, and I wanted their work to be right there on the liner, as well as on the disk.” (Not sure whether the songwriters appreciated the gesture.)
Important to remember that there are several players in this situation… the label, the ‘brand name’ artist (whether a single vocalist or a group,) and the songwriters, specifically the lyricist or lyricists, who are not always the same as the artist.
And, of course, some bands are famous for their incomprehensible lyrics, and lyric sheets would spoil that.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine…
I think it’s just gone out of fashion, for whatever reason. A few years back every CD seemed to have printed lyrics, now hardly any do. I don’t think it’s just about production costs, although it’s probably a factor, as some CDs still come with think booklets full of artwork.
In some genres – punk, for example – printed lyrics are fairly common. I guess the idea there is that the music often has a political message (or a message of some kind, anyway) and bands want their audience to know what they’re saying. They also write their own lyrics and thus have ownership of them. Punk is also likely to be released on ‘independent’ labels, which might help with copyright issues regarding the lyrics, though many independent record labels aren’t really independent. Music where the lyrics are not in English (classical, for example) often includes printed lyrics with a translation. When the lyrics are not written by the artist that performs the songs on the CD – which is very common for mass-market artists and ‘manufactured’ bands – there are definite copyright and ownership issues with printing the lyrics.
Aagramn: A few years ago the music industry wasn’t as obsessed with intellectual property theft as they are now. Downloading music is now portrayed as a real threat to the existence of music itself, and some CDs now come with an insert thanking you for not stealing the music. The lack of trust with which the music industry now treats its customers (copy-protecting CDs so they cannot be copied to portable devices, for example) may be partly responsible for a decline in printed lyrics. Now that CD sales have increased somewhat, there may be a return in printed lyrics; some companies have already abandoned copy protection. It’s not like sales ever dropped to nothing, but they did go down for a few years and the music industry blamed the slower sales entirely on music downloading rather than on the economy, on the music that was being released, or on the fact that record stores were undergoing a transition to selling DVDs as a primary product as well as music.
Well, you can google, ‘music lyrics sites’ and find the group who is singing maddening incomprehensible lyrics at you. There are lots of lyrics sites out there that will give you lyrics for every song your favorite group ever sang.
I’ve been doing this for a while for PINK FLOYD lyrics, which aren’t always intelligible, at least to me. I go to the list, pick out the song I want, set it up on the first stanza, and then pick that song on the CD, and voila; I then follow along, occasionally murmuring things like, “Aha, I should have known that, etc., etc.”
You have to consider the practicality of the issue as well - lyrics on albums were easy to read (relatively). The printing on CDs would have to be almost incomprehensibly small.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen some CDs whose liner notes don’t include the lyrics themselves but do have an address where you can write to request a copy of the lyrics. (One CD I have (Tenterhooks by Chris Mars) says “For a free copy of the lyrics: Send your version of the words which confuse you most along with a SASE to…”)
Because no-one these days writes lyrics worth printing 