Lyrics By The Pound

April 24th, 2007

Lyrics on Yahoo! Music

My earliest Internet music experiences were sharing lyrics on Usenet. Check out this now-embarrassing post from 1992 in rec.music.funky where I’m trying to decode the lyrics to “A Year And A Day” from Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. I can still remember sitting in my walk-in closet, typing on an amber-monitor 8088, transcribing the lyrics to Diamond Dogs and Young Americans only to send them to someone I didn’t know so he could edit and post on Usenet (where are you, man? I think I owe you a cassette of that bootleg with SRV).

Until today, lyrics to popular songs have not been available legally in any mass capacity. The highly fragmented music publishing industry (not record companies) owns the right to publish lyrics and has been very slow to pull together and bless a way of legally distributing them on the Internet. As a result, lyrics have been relegated to rogue sites riddled with popup ads, inconsistent formatting, and often incorrect transcriptions. Every year we at Yahoo! Music say, “This is the year we’re going to sit down with the publishers and figure out how to offer lyrics to our users!” Unfortunately it’s proven to be an incredibly daunting task and we haven’t been able to pull it off on our own.

Today, however, we’re proud to announce that Gracenote has pulled together a comprehensive, consistent, and legal lyrics repository which we have licensed and integrated into the Internet’s #1 music site, Music.Yahoo.com. Now lyrics take their rightful place next to artist bios, discographies, videos, and downloads. All free to you, dear music lover. So check out the lyrics to hits like I’m The One, Start!, Freewill, or even Michelle (that’s right, we have The Beatles).

Also be sure to check our fancy Lyric Search, where you can search for songs by lyric snippet. What was that song that went …? Yahoo! Music can tell you.

Finally, thinking about those early Usenet posts got me all nostalgic so I decided to call professional lyricist Mike D from Beastie Boys and talk about lyrics for a minute. Here’s a snippet of the conversation, where he chides me for not knowing the lyrics to Brass Monkey (when he didn’t know them either), explains how the need for lyrics was the start of Grand Royal Magazine, and tells us that the lyrics for their new record (which they just finished last week) were “effortless”:


Download here

When you think lyrics, think Yahoo! Music. Or Rakim. But mostly Yahoo! Music.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

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