Lyrics By The Pound

Posted by iancr, April 24, 2007 at 8:58 pm, in Yahoo! Music Website. 20 Comments

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

20 Comments »

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  1. [...] Yahoo Music’s Yahoo VP of Product Development Ian Rogers (see our interview here) says a post will be up on the Yahoo Music blog this afternoon with details. Update: Rogers has posted on the Yahoo Music blog, and Lyrics are now live. See music.yahoo.com/lyrics. The lyrics are provided to Yahoo for free in exchange for a revenue share from ads shown on the site. [...]

    Pingback by Yahoo Music To Add Music Lyrics Later Today — April 24, 2007 #

  2. ian, why yet another feature added to the site, but not YMJ?

    Comment by buchananmb — April 24, 2007 #

  3. [...] from this lyrics section will be shared with the copyright owners. lyrics, music YahooShare This Sphere: Related Content Enjoyed reading this post, subscribe to my RSS feed Related Articles at TechnologyBites [...]

    Pingback by Yahoo Music Launched Music Lyrics Today at Technology Bites — April 24, 2007 #

  4. [...] The press release for the announcement is here and the post on Yahoo Music blog by Ian Rogers VP Product Development at Yahoo is here. [...]

    Pingback by Startup Meme » Yahoo Music Adds Music Lyrics, Becomes World’s First Music Lyrics Store — April 25, 2007 #

  5. [...] アップデート: RogersがYahoo Music blogに記事を書いて、ついに歌詞が公開された。 music.yahoo.com/lyricsに注目。掲載される歌詞はサイトに表示される広告の収益分配と引き換えに、無償でYahooに提供されている。 Yahooで「motherf****」ということばを見たのは、これがはじめてだ。 [...]

    Pingback by TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Yahoo Music、楽曲の歌詞を今日これから追加 — April 25, 2007 #

  6. [...] Assim sendo, desde ontem (24 de Abril) pode aceder a este novo serviço a partir deste link. Este post no Yahoo Music Blog dá-lhe mais detalhes sobre o acontecimento. [...]

    Pingback by 2.0 WEBMANIA » Yahoo! e Gracenote dão-nos música! — April 25, 2007 #

  7. Can you seperate the trackbacks from the comments?

    It makes the blog a bit crazy…

    Anyway I agree with buchananmb,

    This is cool but it’s one more feature on the site that didn’t make it to the YMJ.

    Yahoo Music Jukebox would get some buzz if it were the first player to incorporate lyrics.

    And the Launch videos.

    Sigh…

    Comment by resource — April 25, 2007 #

  8. My gosh, yes. Having “Lyrics Search” as an option in YMJ (at the same level as the Artist, Title, Album search) would be absolutely brilliant. Please do that. :D

    Comment by Sean Montgomery — April 25, 2007 #

  9. I’m a kid in the lyrical candy store. The best part about this is that i don’t have to run an anti-spyware program after i get my lyrics.

    Comment by josh_goodman — April 25, 2007 #

  10. [...] And I can see those spider veins…Wait, what are you singing?It’s U2, Bullet the Blue Sky.No, I know the song, but I’m asking what you’re singing.oh, I can see those spider veins… You know, about the creepy old woman that’s watching the kids sleeping in the huts.Uhm, no, it’s “I can see those fighter planes.”What? No, prove it.Sure, here. Check the lyrics.Hang on, Yahoo! has lyrics for songs now?Yep, straight off the publisher so they’re accurate.Cool! Do they have them for all the songs?No, only for about 400,000 or so right now. Although I’m betting they’ll get more eventually.Ok, fine, you’re right. It’s not about creepy old women. Granted, that part did kind of weird me out anyway.Well, if you want more info, you can read Ian’s post on the Music Blog.Huh. Will do. So, about that other song….You mean the Manfred Mann song?Yeah, where they’re talking about feminine hygiene products…I’ll… let you figure that one out by yourself. [...]

    Pingback by Yahoo! Cool thing of the Day » Blog Archive » Revved Up Like a Duece, Another Runner In the Night — April 25, 2007 #

  11. [...] “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,” remarked Ian Rogers, general manager of Yahoo! Music. [...]

    Pingback by KJS Computer Services — April 25, 2007 #

  12. ten years plus in the making… hopefully we’ll find some lyrics of our songs we don’t have in the archives yet, ian :)

    great to see you at the helm of yahoo’s music. don’t know if you recall me from Delicious Vinyl, back around ‘95 Rick Ross and I met with you at your office. i’m back with DV getting their interactive up to speed, after years away.

    Comment by pmoshay — April 25, 2007 #

  13. When are you resurrecting Musical Sausage?

    Comment by riothag — April 25, 2007 #

  14. [...] Searching for lyrics online has always been somewhat of a hit-or-miss affair, with search results driving poor users to pop-up ridden web sites and questionably accurate lyrics. That’s because for reasons beyond my limited mind, aggregating and publishing most song lyrics on the internet was technically illegal. Until yesterday, that is. With Yahoo’s new lyric search, you can count on accurate lyrics drawn from a fairly comprehensive catalog. — Adam Pash Yahoo Music Lyrics [via Yahoo Music Blog] [...]

    Pingback by Techzi » Blog Archive » Find lyrics at Yahoo Music — April 25, 2007 #

  15. Yeah, if it were possible to just have Yahoo Music Jukebox display the lyrics as the song was playing (either from My Music or my my Launchcast station), that would be great.

    Comment by bluesun — April 25, 2007 #

  16. [...] de este post    A del.icio.us     A menéame     AFresqui [...]

    Pingback by Letras de canciones en Yahoo! Music | Think Wasabi — April 26, 2007 #

  17. [...] In case you missed the news over at TechCrunch, Yahoo Music has partnered with Gracenote to offer lyrics for all of their songs (which numbers in the hundreds of thousands). I’ve been using LyricsFly for a long time because of their ad-free interface, but this will no doubt have a larger offering. For more information see the YMusic Blog. [...]

    Pingback by DemoMarks » Blog Archive » Yahoo Music now has Lyrics — April 26, 2007 #

  18. [...] Searching for lyrics online has always been somewhat of a hit-or-miss affair, with search results driving poor users to pop-up ridden web sites and questionably accurate lyrics. That’s because for reasons beyond my limited mind, aggregating and publishing most song lyrics on the internet was technically illegal. Until yesterday, that is. With Yahoo’s new lyric search, you can count on accurate lyrics drawn from a fairly comprehensive catalog. — Adam Pash Yahoo Music Lyrics [via Yahoo Music Blog] [...]

    Pingback by Techzi » Blog Archive » LYRICS: Find lyrics at Yahoo Music — April 26, 2007 #

  19. Great stuff. Rush ‘Losing it’ was always one of my favorite lyrics.

    http://music.yahoo.com/Rush/Losing-It/lyrics/791249

    Comment by Majorseventh — April 27, 2007 #

  20. This is definitely a long time coming. Online lyrics sites are some of the shadiest sites on the Internet.

    Comment by wicked — May 14, 2007 #

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