SoundCtrl – Chatting With Larry Goldberg

by Brian Kecskemety

TuneWiki, the startup that creates social media players for cellphones and handheld devices, has been making a splash in the social music landscape. Many first heard of TuneWiki when their service was announced as a launch partner of Spotify’s new app platform last November. TuneWiki currently has agreements with major music publishers, such as Sony, Universal, and EMI to legally use synchronized lyrics in TuneWiki’s music applications, which include games like Lyric Legend and their flagship eponymous app.

SoundCtrl got a chance to ask a few questions to TuneWiki CEO Larry Goldberg.

How difficult has it been to get licenses to use copyright lyrics?

As you know, there are thousands of music publishers with rights to song lyrics. Getting the rights to lyrics from many of them has been easy, and from others not so easy. Some publishers understood right away how we were trying to make lyrics more relevant and engaging for music fans, but others had to be pitched. Our basic approach was to show them that their lyrics were a very valuable asset, and that advances in technology allowed an innovative company like TuneWiki to help unlock that value in a way that benefits everyone.

Are there certain catalogs of lyrics that TuneWiki is missing that you’d really like to add?

There are, and we are working hard to finalize agreements with these composers and publishers. Our users regularly request lyrics that we don’t yet have, so we are making sure these publishers know that there are opportunities to let music fans have an expanded experience with their songs. But all in all, we have very solid lyrics coverage and have deals for all of the major publishing catalogs. We also have the largest database of synced lyrics in the world and most of our rights are global.

What were the biggest challenges in launching the apps?

The biggest challenge is to continue to innovate and update the apps with cool new features that music fans want to interact with. In our social music player you can now share lyrics to Facebook and Twitter, and you can have conversation around lyrics and your favorite songs with other members of the TuneWiki community. You can also discover other TuneWiki members with similar music tastes and see what they are playing. These social and discovery features have really helped expand our popularity beyond those who just want a great music player with scrolling lyrics.

What ways are you marketing your apps and services?

We use a lot of different techniques, but we are relying more and more on social media as the most important way to reach new audiences. We have growing communities on Facebook and Twitter and some very interesting ideas for engaging users from other sites that we will be rolling out over the next few months. We haven’t done any events yet by ourselves, but we are looking into that for this year. We were one of the featured apps at Spotify’s press conference in December when they announced their new partner platform, and we got a lot of very positive feedback and awareness from that event.

Are there any new applications in the pipeline?

Yes–we have a new mobile game coming out in a few weeks, so stay tuned for more info. We’re taking a very popular music genre on console gaming and bringing it to mobile in a way that hasn’t been done before. Additionally, we have several new features for our social music player that are about to be released and that I don’t believe have been offered by any other music service. These include seeing who the top fans are for every song and also which lyrics in a song are the ones generating the most conversation within our network.