Photo Credit: Deezer
Deezer has joined forces with a consortium of music industry players to form BELEM, an EU-funded lyrics translation project.
BELEM is a four-year project that has received €2 million in funding through the Creative Europe Programme (CREA). The initiative hopes to drive new revenue streams to key players across the music industry by promoting European lyrics and the translation of these lyrics–along with monetization. The project aims to amplify the co-creation and co-production of European lyrics and add new economic value to European musical and linguistic heritage.
The project is placing a strong focus on online and streaming lyrics translations, as well as supporting publisher capacity building and the songwriters themselves on the creation and translation of their lyrics. BELEM will also seek to benefit labels and artists by providing better accessibility for lyric videos–including translated lyrics.
“In the digital age, it’s imperative for music to be localized, universal, and accessible,” says Florian von Hoyer, COO at MusicHUB and BELEM Lead on behalf of Zebralution. “Lyrics hold a vital function in understanding music. But language barriers present a major obstacle.”
“Through human-translated lyrics, we can help bridge the gap of understanding, expose artists to entirely new audiences, and help those artists to monetize their lyrics and the translations better. This project has a grand ambition—to empower artists and connect cultures to transform European music revenues and understanding.”
As a significant partner in BELEM, Deezer has already worked with LyricFind to translate over 10,000 lyrics in four languages–all displayed in the Deezer app. For subscribers, on-demand multilingual translation has introduced a brand-new music experience for music fans. Many of the most popular English songs now have lyrics available in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.”
Alongside Deezer, BELEM includes 14 EU music publishing, technology, distribution, labels, and academic partners. The full list of companies participating in the project include:
- AMAEI
- Bardis
- Deezer
- .MUSIC
- Fleepit
- Independent Digital
- Lusitanian Music
- LyricFind
- Mars Music
- Metatron
- Nord University
- Broma 16
- RUNDA
- Unison Rights
- Zebralution
BELEM stands for Boostom European Lyrics and their Entrepreneurial Monetization. It focuses efforts on the licensing, aggregation, distribution, exhibition, and translation for the meaning of lyrics for a variety of audiences.