Milun Tesovic Goes Big with MetroLyrics

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Britney Spears

How a 23-year-old SFU student made himself – and his company, MetroLyrics – a star in song lyrics.

Of all the people who’ve grown wealthy off her, Britney Spears almost certainly doesn’t know Milun Tesovic, a bespectacled business student from SFU. To be fair, it’s not just Spears that Tesovic is riding to the bank; it’s Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift too, and a hundred other members of the bubble-gum-pop pantheon.

Tesovic is in the lyrics game, and it’s surprisingly profitable: his Burnaby-based Metro­Lyrics is the second biggest among Internet sites offering song lyrics to visitors. MetroLyrics makes its money by connecting its 32 million monthly viewers – predominantly young women – with advertisers.

It’s the most trafficked website in Canada, by a wide margin, more popular than the CBC’s website, which is Tesovic’s nearest competitor. In April MetroLyrics entered into a strategic partnership with the web’s top online music destination, AOL Music, to provide lyrics for all its properties. The deal’s financial details have not been released, but the alliance will direct millions of new visitors to metrolyrics.com.

Tesovic came up with the business model seven years ago, as a 16-year-old, when he discovered that song lyrics are among the most-searched-for items on the Internet. His immediate goal was vehicular; he wanted a summer job that would pay him enough to buy a car and that wouldn’t have him flipping burgers.

Tesovic’s first car was a conservative one, a Mazda MX-6, but he’s since cultivated a taste for the exotic. On his driveway now are a Range Rover and a Corvette, and he’ll be one of the first in Vancouver to own the long-anticipated 2010 Chevy Camaro. “The first thing you want to do when you come here from a third-world country” – he emigrated from Bosnia in 1994 – “is buy a car.”

A typical day for Tesovic is a split between school and office. The business success has made him busy, but he’ll be graduating with his business degree this year.

Tesovic declines to say who his favourite lyricist is – “Things like that cause heated discussion on the site,” he says – but the local band Theory of a Deadman is the CD in his car at the moment. Not Britney? “No,” he says with a laugh, “but if I met her, I’d tell her she’s doing the right thing: making music.” There’s another word he might want to say to her: “Thanks.”

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