Just a point of clarification: It wasn't the RIAA that shut down pearLyrics, it was Warner/Chappell Music, a music publisher. W/C is part of Warner Music, which is a record label, but it isn't a label itself. It may seem like a trivial distinction, but I think the RIAA's actions have been objectionable enough without attributing actions to it that it didn't do. And it's important to keep track of all the players in this sorry saga.
But on your main point, I agree. What's the big deal? Yahoo! has already been doing this, and Google's implementation is pretty bare-bones. I wasn't even sure what the Google blog was talking about when I first tried a music search. Seems like anything Google does, however trivial, gets gigabytes worth of coverage these days.
