Planet Money has a somewhat interesting radio show this week on music lyrics. It prominently features Camper Beethoven/Cracker singer David Lowery. As mentioned before, Lowery lived on the 200 block of S. Laurel while he wrote much of the album Kerosene Hat.

The topic of the Planet Money show is about how lyrics of songs are available on the internet and the question of ‘fair use’. From the show synopsis:

There are roughly 5 million searches for lyrics per day on Google, according to LyricFind. Those searches often lead to websites that post lyrics to lots of songs — and, in many cases, sites that post ads alongside those lyrics.

David Lowery, frontman and songwriter for Cracker and Camper van Beethoven, is waging war on the sites he believes make money off song lyrics but don’t pay the songwriter. Once he took a closer look at where his music was making money on the Internet, he realized: There were more people searching to find lyrics to his songs than searching to illegally download mp3s of his music. And he wasn’t making money off those searches. Last November, after months of exhaustive and systematic Googling, he released something called The Undesirable Lyric Website List.

There’s more to it, of course, and may be worth a full listen.