LyricFind, CEO & Founder

At LyricFind, Darryl is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the company, including licensing and distribution. Darryl pioneered the digital lyrics space, successfully negotiating the first-ever mass lyrics licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing in 2005.

Darryl Ballantyne originally conceived LyricFind in 2000 with Mohamed Moutadayne and Chris Book at Ontario's University of Waterloo to be the largest, most accurate destination for lyrics on the Internet. Officially launched in 2004, the company pioneered the licensed digital lyrics space, successfully negotiating the first-ever mass lyrics licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing in 2005. Since then, Darryl has grown LyricFind to be the largest legal, licensed lyrics database in the world, with millions of licensed tracks available and thousands of lyrics sublicensing clients.

LyricFind has established licensing and content relationships with over 2,000 music publishers, AMG, The Harry Fox Agency and Rovi. The company now delivers services to over 1,000 website and mobile applications that want to enhance their music products with lyrics, including Microsoft's Bing, Rhapsody, Lyrics.com, Slacker, Shazam, Virgin Media UK, Cox Radio, and mSpot. In addition, LyricFind offers two direct to consumer mobile applications, LyricFind Lite and LyricFind Pro for the iPhone, iPad, and Android platforms.

As an authority on licensing and digital content, Darryl has spoken at industry events including SF Music Tech and Canadian Music Week. Before launching LyricFind, Darryl was Manager of Digital Development & Distribution at EMI Music in Los Angeles, where he was involved in deals with companies such as MusicMatch, Napster, and iTunes. Darryl earned a Bachelor of Mathematics with a Business minor from the University of Waterloo.

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