Biography|Massimo Ciociola — The Lyrics Company Founded at Number 5

The street that starts at Bologna’s Two Towers is not a metaphor. It is the address on the company letterhead.

Musixmatch lists its headquarters at Via San Vitale 5, 40125 Bologna, a few doors off Piazza di Porta Ravegnana.

English Wikipedia, citing the firm’s own history, dates the founding to 21 January 2010.

The co-founders named in that account are Massimo Ciociola, Gianluca Delli Carri, Francesco Delfino and Giuseppe Costantino. A fifth name, Valerio Paolini, appears in the same history paragraph.

The idea was older than the company. Later profiles describe Ciociola noticing, after a decade in mobile content, that “lyrics” sat among the most-searched words on Google and that song texts were still a grey market.

The 2010 incorporation turned that observation into a licensed database.

By January 2015 the company had raised about 14.1 million dollars from angels and Italian venture funds, including Paolo Barberis, P101 and United Ventures.

The product is easy to parody as karaoke. The business is metadata sold under contract to Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google, Instagram and others.

Number 5 is a working office, not a museum. The pin is the published HQ, already on the contact page, not a private flat.

A visitor who walks the first block of Via San Vitale from the leaning Garisenda is standing on the street where an Italian lyrics house decided to stay in Bologna rather than pretend to be from Palo Alto.

Photo: Vanni Lazzari, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons