LyricFind
LyricFind is a provider of licensed music lyrics and data. In 2005, the company signed the first-ever lyric licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing. As of January 2025, LyricFind has over 12 million total songs in its lyric licensing database, including over 1.3 million word-by-word synced songs. The company is based in Toronto.
Background
LyricFind was co-founded by CEO Darryl Ballantyne, CTO Mohamed Moutadayne, and Board of Directors member Chris Book, who launched an early consumer-focused version of the site while they were students at the University of Waterloo. After meeting music executive Ted Cohen at the Canadian Music Week conference, Ballantyne was hired as an intern at EMI and eventually convinced Cohen to join the LyricFind Board of Directors. Ballantyne then secured the company’s first lyric licenses with Cohen’s help, including major music publisher EMI Music Publishing, and officially launched LyricFind as a lyric licensing business. By 2012, it had secured global rights deals with all four major music publishers. In 2024, LyricFind had partnerships with over 50,000 publishers and facilitated over $25 million in payments to rightsholders over the course of the year. Ballantyne was also named to the 2024 Billboard Canada Power Players list.In 2007, LyricFind partnered with RealNetworks to bring searchable lyrics to Rhapsody Online, one of the first music streaming services. It later partnered with Gracenote in 2013 to power all of the company’s lyric services and Google in 2016 to display lyrics directly in Google Search for the first time. As of 2024, LyricFind’s clients include music platforms such as Amazon Music, Xperi, YouTube Music, Pandora, Deezer, and more.
LyricFind also powers Billboard’s LyricFind U.S. and LyricFind Global charts, which were launched in 2015 and remain active as of 2025. Each week, they rank trending songs that have seen a surge in lyrics searches, based on lyric displays across all of LyricFind’s clients.
LyricFind’s in-house team handles lyric translations in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean. In 2020, LyricFind expanded its operations in Asia and Africa, establishing a new language team in India to focus on transcribing lyrics in Hindi, Punjabi, and Marathi. Its team in Vietnam was also expanded to add Cantonese and Mandarin translations to its existing Malay, Bahasa, Thai, Tagalog, and Vietnamese lyrics. In addition, its Johannesburg team was tasked with covering southern African languages such as Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, and more.
In 2021, LyricFind launched a video creation tool enabling users to automatically generate lyric videos with custom backgrounds, fonts, and visualizers. After acquiring Rotor Videos in 2023, LyricFind expanded those capabilities to include music videos, social media videos, and animated album art with Spotify Canvas and Apple Music Album Motion. The tool, named Videos by LyricFind, has since been integrated into CD Baby.