Lyrics By The Pound
April 24th, 2007My earliest Internet music experiences were sharing on . Check out . I can still remember sitting in my walk-in closet, typing on an amber-monitor , transcribing the lyrics to and 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 ).
Until , 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 has pulled together a comprehensive, consistent, and legal lyrics repository which we have licensed and integrated into the Internet’s #1 music site, . Now take their rightful place next to artist bios, discographies, videos, and downloads. All free to you, dear music lover. So to hits like , , , or even (that’s right, we have ).
Also be sure to check , where you can search for songs by lyric snippet. What was that song that went …? .
Finally, thinking about those early Usenet posts got me all nostalgic so I decided to call professional lyricist Mike D from and talk about lyrics for a minute. Here’s a snippet of the conversation, where he chides me for not knowing (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”:
When you think lyrics, think . Or . But mostly .