MTV Nets Drawing Audience With Pop Lyrics

MTV, VH1 and CMT are all launching multi-platform entertainment and gaming experiences built around pop music lyrics to draw their audiences in.

On air, MTV’s “Spankin’ New Lyrics Week” supplants “Spankin’ New Music Week,” which starts its season on Nov. 26, with a week of segments featuring artists talking about inspirations for their lyrics. VH1 and CMT will develop similar segments.

Each music video channel will provide full lyric search capabilities online, with links to view music videos, buy tunes and get information on artist bios. The mobile iterations of each MTV channel will enable cell phone users to text an artist’s name, song name or lyric line to receive a link to a page to see the complete lyrics on their handsets.

All three channels will also develop single and multi-player trivia games for the Web and mobile extensions of their respective brands.

“Our goal is to drive deeper engagement in the music by threading it across all our screens,” MTV spokesman Matthew Hutchison said.

The lyrics experiences will be rolled out in phases starting next month and continuing through the first half of next year.