The success of Walmart created an environment where only good business decisions in a short term destroyed of the brand and profits in the long term.
(1) If supplier did not deal trough Walmart, their market gradually declined because Big-Box Retailers squeezed out alternative channels.
(2) Eventually supplier made deal with Walmart to stop decline in the market share. First years saw profits increase and huge increase in sales. But Walmart buyers come in regularly every year and demand smaller price. And they don't take no as an answer. They are ruthless negotiators and religious about cutting prices. First supplier profit margins drop, then absolute profits, then they must cut the quality of the product. Eventually they have destroyed their brand and the product.
There are hundreds of suppliers who suffered this fate. Destruction of Levi Strauss brand and quality is classic business case.
Music lyrics sites just seem like an unviable business. They license low-value data from the owner, surround it with a crapton of ads, then serve that up to users. They have very little stickiness and one is about as good as another. From a user perspective, having those results directly on Google is better about 90% of the time. There are only two lyrics sites I'm aware of that offer any value above Google's version: songmeanings.net and genius.com, and the little value they provide comes from the hosting of user comments.
Lyrics sites come up a lot on here, but I do not really understand why. Consumers do not get much benefit from their continued existence. The only people who benefit are the site owners themselves.
Internet content making is someone anyone can do. It's hard to make it profitable.
Is this really the fault of big tech?
Yes. And if lower prices are the only reason for antitrust everything is fine.
In the US at the beginning of the 80s Robert Bork broke from the traditional antitrust thinking and started a tradition where only "consumer welfare" (lower prices) are meaningful reason for antitrust policies.
Rest of the world never bought that and now thinking even in the US is starting to change. Free markets are not just about low prices. Restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles are coming back. Such as applying common carrier obligations and duties to platform economics.
>Is this really the fault of big tech?
I didn't make any normative statements.
Nitpick: you mean meta noindex and/or robots.txt
Google can probably do voice recognition now on songs and get the lyrics without outside parties (see youtube cc which is pretty good).
Or they can strike a deal with music companies to get lyrics when they get the songs...
They are not scraping them from websites who as always are completely free to exempt themselves from searches via the sitemap.xml file.