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Yahoo Launches First Legal Lyrics Site

By Nate Mook, BetaNews

April 24, 2007, 5:19 PM

Yahoo! Music on Tuesday is launching the first legitimate repository for song lyrics thanks to a licensing deal with Gracenote, the company behind CDDB. Lyrics for 400,000 songs from the five major record labels and more will initially be available.

While lyrics have long been available on the Web, with some sites boasting libraries even larger than Yahoo's, this is the first official effort, which required deals with nearly 100 music publishers. Current illegitimate lyric sites also contain many errors, and tend to make money through spyware and other questionable advertising methods.

"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.

Gracenote has been working to build its lyric library for more than two years, and the deal with Yahoo is the first time it is being made available to consumers free of charge. BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner have all opened their catalogs to Gracenote, along with dozens of independent music publishers.

Yahoo planned to create its own such lyric offering, but Rogers said it proved to be too daunting a task for the company. Thus, it partnered with Gracenote instead and is pleased with the results.

"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)," added Rogers.

Yahoo has built a Lyric Search for the new offering, which will pull up songs based on names or matching phrases. Lyrics will also be integrated into Yahoo! Music Artist Pages, as well as the company's Web and Audio searches.

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By gatoazulman

edited May 2, 2007 - 1:30 AM

Has no one ever heard of songmeanings.net? It has no popup ads and an excellent community, and it's also very accurate due to the community moderation. Yahoo shouldn't give itself so much credit.

Score: 0

By kashin

edited Apr 26, 2007 - 1:07 AM

Everything Yahoo touches turns to crap and goes down the drain. They remind me of AOL and Corel, companies who couldn't innovate or make any decent products. So what do they do? They go around buying up smaller companies with great products and then proceed to run them into the ground. I will never forgive Corel for ruining Paint Shop Pro for example.

Also, I'm sick and tired of Yahoo bundling their useless toolbar with everything, just to get on your desktop and into your browser. When I download things like Nero Burning Rom, I always have to "opt" out of getting Yahoo's toolbar along with it. Ugh! I don't even have to go to the site to know the layout is probably disgusting and induces vomiting. Oooh 400,000 songs, that's great, but the one song you're looking for will always be the one they happen to be missing.

Stick with Google instead, it never fails. A simple search like "lyrics artist-name song-title" in Google works better than anything Yahoo could ever offer. I'm sure this new "service" will have all kinds of clever ads plastered all over the place. "If you like this song, click here to buy the album." Anything for a buck.

The last time I tried using Gracenote, the lyrics there were crap. I expect no better from Yahoo. Most of the lyrics are submitted by zit faced fourteen year olds who don't know the difference between "your", "you're", and "there", "they're", "their", just because they happen to sound the same.

Score: 0

By DJInsomniac

posted Apr 26, 2007 - 7:15 AM

The whole point of having a first "legal" lyrics site, is so that the lyrics are from the record labels, and therefore official. Not zit-faced 14 year olds.

I wish you would learn to read the article.

Score: 0

By PostDeals

posted Apr 25, 2007 - 11:37 PM

And now what Yahoo?

Score: 0

By Tene

posted Apr 25, 2007 - 9:14 PM

But ... does it work in Lynx?

Score: 0

By Sexbarril

posted Apr 26, 2007 - 2:50 AM

Is that like a bobcat?

Latz, SB

Score: 0

By TimothyAaron08

edited Apr 25, 2007 - 3:19 PM

Nothing Amazing.

The first song I looked at (I do believe it's number at on the Top 40 Charts) wasn't there and after just clicking on a random song finding out how they display the lyrics... not exactly amazing. I'll pass on using this...

Score: 0

By Neoprimal

posted Apr 25, 2007 - 11:24 AM

I'm guessing the next thing to come from yahoo to possibly be a Lyrics widget that integrates with certain media players.....hopefully. If not then of what use is the site? Who wants to LOAD a site every single time they want lyrics? Not to be ungrateful or anything but in a world of minilyrics and evilyrics, this is slightly behind. I understand the copyright issues (well, not really, what are people going to do? write the music, sing over the song and sell it?) but this is neither practical nor efficient.