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Song lyrics website founder wins business award: Multi-million-dollar business earns SFU student top prize in international competition

A British Columbia student who runs MetroLyrics, the Internet's most popular song lyrics website, has won an international young entrepreneurs contest.

Milun Tesovic, a 24-year-old who immigrated to Canada from Bosnia with his family at age nine, beat out 32 competitors at the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards in Kansas City, Missouri, on Thursday.

“To be chosen out of all of these great businesses as the student entrepreneur of the year is just a bit mind-boggling,” he said in an interview on Friday.

As a teenager, Mr. Tesovic said he was passionate about listening to music and often made bets with friends about the exact lyrics of popular songs. Frustrated that many websites were rife with errors, he started a lyrics database which he turned into a website in 2001, at age 16.

With more than 38 million unique monthly visitors, MetroLyrics is the most popular lyrics site and ranks among the top five overall music sites.

“He's got an amazing brand. He's got a really great company that does very, very well,” said Greg Hill, the competition's program co-ordinator.

Mr. Tesovic, who is in the last year of a Bachelor of Business Administration degree at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, said the website is a multi-million dollar business but wouldn't disclose precise revenues, which are driven by ads.

The young entrepreneur has 10 employees and runs MetroLyrics with a long-time family friend. The website provides licensed lyrics and gives part of its profits to recording artists. The site's top searches as of Friday were Bad Romance by Lady GaGa and Rihanna's Russian Roulette.

Mr. Tesovic's love of music led him to try learning to play the piano and guitar as a teen, but he stopped because he lacked talent.

“I'm pretty much the definition of a type-A personality, so for me my mind's always going a mile a second and just constantly thinking numbers, business ideas, different strategies, different crazy things, good things, innovations that we could do,” he said. “I think for the guitar and piano, it takes a bit of a different mindset or at least different type of individual to be good at it.”

Mr. Tesovic is the first Canadian to win the 10-year-old contest, which is judged by established entrepreneurs. The competition, which is run by the non-profit Entrepreneurs' Organization, received 1,500 nominations from 18 countries this year. To be eligible, students must be studying full-time while operating profitable businesses.

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