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lyrics posts

Filed under: Business, Web services

Wikia gets into the lyrics business, acquires LyricWiki

Most people have heard of Wikipedia, but Wikia (co-founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales) is a little bit less well-known. It's a collection of fan-based wikis where people can obsessively catalog info about sports teams, bands, movies, and all kinds of other pop culture material. The latest addition to Wikia is song lyrics, now that the company has purchased LyricWiki.

In the process of snapping up LyricWiki, Wikia also negotiated a licensing deal for the song lyrics themselves, so there's no worry about record companies trying to shut the site down. Wikia runs on open-source wiki software and doesn't show tons of ads, like every other lyric site you'll stumble upon if you try Googling for song lyrics. It also has the advantage of a large number of users to correct the lyrics, so you're likely to find more accurate results than on sites that function more as banner-ad billboards than lyrics collections.

[via VentureBeat]

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Apple

Pollux tags your music files in iTunes so you don't have to

PolluxPollux is a new Mac OS X application by Chetan Surpur and Shashwat Kandadai that will automatically tag your music files in iTunes. It is capable of tagging the name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for each song, and it does so by analyzing the song's audio fingerprint. This means that it can draw on a database of tag information, and do so very accurately, even if the song has no identifying information at all to begin with.

To use Pollux, you select songs in iTunes, then from the Pollux icon in your menu bar, choose Tag Selected iTunes Tracks. Tagging can take a little while, so don't expect instant results. In my testing I found tags to return in anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds. Tagging an entire library this way could certainly take some time, but since it's all automated, why not? There is also an option in Pollux to automatically tag any new music that is imported into iTunes.

There are other applications that do similar things, but Pollux sets itself apart by being both unobtrusive and free. Pollux is still in beta, so you might experience a problem here and there, though in my limited testing it was solid.

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web

Pandora internet radio adds lyrics... for some songs

Pandora Lyrics
Internet radio stations Pandora and Last.fm have been in the news a lot over the last year for removing features - like the ability for users in most of the world to listen to free music streams. So it's nice to see Pandora launch a raft of new features, even if they're only available to users in the US.

At the top of the list of new features is support for lyrics. Pandora has partnered with Gracenote to provide lyrics for some songs. To see if lyrics are available, click the "About This Music" tab and then select lyrics. You'll see the first few lines and a link to click for the full set of lyrics, which will open in another browser window.

Honestly, I tried listening to about a dozen songs this morning and Pandora only managed to find lyrics for two. So this feature is clearly still a work in progress. But it definitely shows promise.

Pandora has also added a new "gift" option that lets you create a custom station by selecting up to 5 artists and songs and sending it to a friend with a message. It's sort of like a somewhat randomized mix-tape.

Filed under: Fun, News, Search

Metrolyrics adopts Gracenote authorized lyrics service

MetroLyrics, one of the largest online sites to search for and find song lyrics, has just announced the addition of Gracenote's catalog of lyrics into its existing database.

In case you didn't know, Gracenote is currently the largest database of licensed (read: accurate) song lyrics out there, and has agreements with the big dogs: EMI, Universal/BMG, Sony/ATV, and Warner/Chappell. That last line included the most forward slashes we've ever used in a single sentence. Ever.

In its humble beginnings, MetroLyrics was mainly driven by community submission, meaning an individual would submit lyrics to a song that he or she liked, and then the community would rate the accuracy of those lyrics. Of course, because none of these submissions were authorized by the music companies, they were probably infringing on some sort of copyright. Worse still, their accuracy could never be completely assured.

After all, how could you know for sure that you downloaded the correct lyrics to "It's the end of the world as we know it" by REM? How would you know whether this line reproduced here:

Right you vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light,
Feeling pretty psyched


Was correct or not?

Don't we already live in enough uncertainty?

The inclusion of the Gracenote catalog is a boon for MetroLyrics and its users. We're not sure at this point how MetroLyrics intends to monetize their site; including the Gracenote catalog seems to imply that the artists will get proper compensation for the use of their creative output, and it's not clear whether that compensation will come from online advertising or from the users themselves. Only time will tell.

(Thanks for the tip, Alan!)

Filed under: Audio, Internet

MTV to launch lyrics services

MTVRemember when the M in MTV stood for music? Sure, now the TV channel shows more "reality" content than music. But if you wake up early enough in the morning you might still be able to catch a music video or two. And the network's website is chock full of music video goodness. Of course, most kids these days would rather go find videos on YouTube.

So what's a music network to do? How about offering a new multimedia service that helps you answer that age old question: who the heck sings that song stuck in my head? CNET's WebWare reports that MTV is about to roll out new lyrics-based services for TV viewers, website visitors, and cellphone customers.

Leveraging Gracenote technology, MTV will let you type out lyrics on your computer or cellphone and get a bit of information about the artist and song. There'll also be trivia, games, and a link to purchase the song. Odds are MTV will tie the service into its own music store because, you know, they have to make money off of this thing somehow.

Filed under: Audio, Business, Yahoo!

Yahoo's sing song search with lyrics

yahoo music lyricsYahoo is letting users of the World Wide Web share in a sing song with the release of song lyrics.

Yahoo has teamed up with Gracenote to bring users song lyrics from all five major music publishers featuring the words for songs from U2, Price, The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Kanye West.

The new lyric database will be available through the Yahoo Music portal. This new initiative has just made Yahoo the largest licensed song lyrics database that is available to consumers. Users will now be able to search song lyrics from the Yahoo Music Search bar by entering a few lines of a song.

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services

Is Lyric Snapper the new pearLyrics?

Lyric Snapper is a free iTunes add-on that will locate the lyrics to any song in your playlist. The program essentially searches the web for lyrics to a particular tune and downloads them from available websites while the song is being played. Lyrics are then updated in the song Info within iTunes and saved to your iTunes library.

If you're not excited about the add-on you can also use Lyric Snapper as a program separate from iTunes to search for song lyrics by song title or artist. Lyric Snapper is currently in beta, with its first release a few days ago.

Sound familiar? Lyric Snapper is very similar to pearLyrics a program we covered in 2005. Shortly after being released pearLyrics received a cease-and desist letter from Warner/Chappel music who felt the program infringed on their copyright to the music despite the fact that much like Lyric Snapper it only searched public websites and did the same thing that anyone could do with a normal web browser. pearLyrics -- a small developer -- pulled their app off the market not having the resources to fight a huge company, the EFF stepped in and tried to help the developer ultimately getting Warner to apologize to pearLyrics and agree to work with them, a promise that they never fulfilled.

pearLyrics was Mac only and Lyric Snapper is currently PC only. It will be interesting to see if history repeats itself with Lyric Snapper. Will record companies fight the app or will they make good on their almost 2 year old promise and help these lyrics searchers out. We'll hide and watch, but we won't bother holding our breath.

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