Look for music Lyrics to be added for hundreds of thousands of songs to Yahoo music later today, the first time they will appear legally on the Internet. They are being provided through a partnership with Gracenote, which is best known for its technology to detect and block copyrighted songs on websites. The company has been working with labels for some time to aggregate rights to song lyrics.
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.
This is the first time I’ve seen the word “motherf****ers” on Yahoo. 
Wow, this is super cool, over the weekend I was at the http://superviva.com party and we were looking at old records and comments were made that you don’t get to read the lyrics any more with downloads. Good job to yahoo, I think they get it.
Aw man. This is going to take some of the fun out of my idiot college roomates singing rants. I always enjoyed watching them stumble and in most cases “invent” thier own lyrics, (Van Halen – Little Guitars — one of my roomates thought DLR was singing about Etch-a-Sketch).
Getting lyrics wrong is part of the fun of rock music in general. Don’t forget it was Ozzy Osbourne who thought Jimi Hendrix actually said…. Excuse Me, While I Kiss This Guy…..
Isn’t Gracenote most well known for taking the contents of the community generated CDDB private? Or am I thinking of someone else?
Gracenote is the company behind CDDB. They seem to have a habit of trying to privately own user-generated-content, including content their partners collect for them.
I think this is a fascinating case of vaporware — telling the press before the code goes live. Thanks for clearing this up, Michael. I had just blogged wondering what was going on here.
I believe it goes live around 3 pm PST
Cool! Now we just need a movie subtitles section and we’re done.
For what its worth, I LOVE Yahoo Music, especially how well the Unlimited services plays with PlaysForSure portable players. Very simple music to go. Nice work!
Make sure to check out the program EvilLyrics at http://www.evillabs.sk
It autodownloads lyrics from “grey market” websites, saves them to your harddrive.
It can also hilight the lyrics as they are sung, via a database of 60,000 songs, or simply by doing it yourself once and letting it record.
It can also send the lyrics to Winamp’s Milkdrop plugin, creating a triptastic and informative backdrop for music at house parties.
Andy: You’re right, and you took the words right out of my fingers. Gracenote is not nearly as well known for copyright-hunting skills as they are for community theft, but maybe they’d like to be since there hasn’t been a peep about it since the last time TechCrunch mentioned it. Certainly a corporate tie-up with Fox/MySpace doesn’t necessarily imply anything in this regard except maybe as legal “we’re trying!” cover for Myspace.
Cool!
What will “hundreds of thousands of songs” include?
Will it be limited to certain studios? Is it going to include all of Yahoo! Music’s songs?
My favorite music service just got better. Considering how important lyric searching is for me when I’m looking for new music, this new feature is welcomed.
He’s weird!!!! Really is Music & Lyrics really web 2.0 ?
It’s about time that Lyrics come with every song downloaded through iTunes. How cool would it be for song lyrics to be automatically loaded?
do you tech bloggers just read each other’s blogs and post them as your own? I read this same identical post on about 12 other blogs before reading it here on yours. TC has gotten really lame lately. I use Bloglines and I’m thinking of removing it.
adam, i feel your pain buddy. You cant win them all. Did you check to see time stamps? As far as I can tell, MA is one of the best one it comes to original content.
As for lyrics, do you all really like to sing along? That’s the funniest part for me.
“How cool would it be…” Are you the right person to ask a question with the word “cool” in it? I dont’ think so…
They’ve made it so that you can’t copy the text off the page. All the other lyrics sites you can copy the text and then paste it into iTunes.
For me, this site is useless.
Twriter,
Heh, yeah. The lyrics are in an image, and there’s some (relatively) lame CSS tricks so when you right click, the browser doesn’t indicate it’s an image.
But the font is pretty consistent, so OCR software from the 90s should be able to make quick work of that. Next thing you know, they’ll captcha-ize it.
Who wants to be the first to create a web service that undoes this?
That is extremely awesome. Major kudos to Yahoo!
Quick and dirty. Download GNU OCR (ocrad) from gnu.org, and you’ll need convert from ImageMagick. Invoke with the URL of the lyrics page on Yahoo’s site as the first argument. Has some problems with J and S, they show as numbers; plus, I’m too lazy to fix the quantization/maxval issue without converting to gif as an intermediary, or the brute force HTML parsing. Someone else can do that.
#!/bin/bash
LI=`wget -o /dev/null -O – $1 |
grep lyricist |
grep lcontainer |
grep src= |
sed -e ’s/^.\+http:/http:/; s/”.\+$//; s/amp;//g;’`
:
wget -o /dev/null -O – $LI |
convert – -resize 400% -threshold 58.82% gif:- |
convert – ppm:- |
./ocrad
If Yahoo is to be a serious player in the social networking space then it needs to buy my site Facebook for eight billion.
Passing on Facebook will be a mistake similar to what happened four years back when Yahoo did not buy Google for three billion. Instead it bought that junkie Mark Cuban’s site broadcast.com for five billion shortly after which it went brain dead like Cuban’s dad. Now how much is Google worth?
Yahoo must take steps to gain a real leadership position in social networking or risk not participating in what could be one of the leading sources of growth in the consumer Internet sector over the next five-plus years. It is this growth that leads me to estimate that in five years time Facebook will be worth at least 15 billion.
If that embarassment Semel does not buy Facebook then he should be fired. That is what happened to Viacom’s Freston after he did not buy MySpace. Having said that if I was a founder of MySpace Tom Anderson then I would have slit murdoch’s throat a long time ago for robbing me and my shareholders of billions of dollars. After buying MySpace for 580 mil News corp does a deal with Google for 900 mil. That was sheer daylight robbery. If Yahoo’s managers are not clueless they will buy Facebook
before it is too late.
This is also a great tinme to be a web 2.0 entrepreneur. Companies like CBS are lining up in the region of three billion for the next youtube. So there is a good chance to hit the lottery even if the product is junk. Often during boomtime people act stupidly like when Terra bought Lycos which is now dead and buried for $12.5 billion and @Home paid $7.2 billion buy for Excite.
Certainly people like Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Bob Davis were my role models when I decided to hide online instead of hacking it out in a Mcjob in the real world. They created a junk startup Excite and hit a home run. Though the merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations these bums who took it easy in life laughed all the way to the bank. I hope to similarly be a role model to other net entrepreneurs.
mrkzuckerberg@yahoo.com
is there anything less cool than Yahoo Music? maybe Yahoo Pets is less interesting. the yahoo mail is less useful. but less cool?
Their atrocious java-type player used to crash all the time. what an abomination. Java. Ten years of continued failure on the desktop, but the geniuses at Yahoo have it all figured out. Brilliant.
and then some folks moved on to other things and were lauded for having headed the travesty that is yahoo music.
the page hugs the side of the page like an overplayed Beyonce tune (’to the left, to the left’). the blocky layout is completely uninteresting and uninspiring. is this 1994? the site pushes consumerism so hard, even teenagers can recognize they’re getting scammed. you try to go to what you think might be the one interesting page on the entire site and it won’t load – period. the SXSW page – don’t even bother. who’s _running_ that joint? is anybody in charge?
let’s talk numbers. just how bad _is_ yahoo music? when will they finally put this beast out of its misery? how much money has that operation lost since it came online? or let’s just take last year. $5 million? more?
as for Facebook, i don’t know what the kiddies dig about it, but after hearing the Youngster speak at Startup School, I came away convinced that he’s quite capable of taking Facebook to the next level and beyond. He was the best speaker in large part for his vocal support of putting power in the hands of people who could most affect change in the organization – pushing power out to competent people and letting them create – the exact opposite of Yahoo.
The best move Yahoo could make at this point is to buy Facebook before Facebook buys Yahoo. Terry Semel is at the helm, and investors are happy enough, it seems. Good for them. I’m loving watching Yahoo go down the drain. Hope they keep the good-haired movie-guy in charge for another year or so, just long enough to prevent a recovery.
p.s. an exercise for the reader: go to yahoo finance, type in ‘yahoo’. see what happens. then go back and try again (you’ll see what i mean). two searches, and still no hits, extra pages, whatever. yahoo is pathetic. at some point, somewhere along the line, yahoo is gonna have to be better than pathetic at _something_, won’t they?
i say the movie studios just buy yahoo, finish killing it, and finally, sell off the spare parts. the end of an era. but first let’s have Semel lay off a few thousand workers (thanks, Brad), just to prove that he’s listening to investors (because we know layoffs hardly affect long-term results). fun times.
Any idea of whether Yahoo will add this to its API range?
They have a very strange approach to censorship. Check the lyrics from Bowie’s ‘Amsterdam’:
And they turn and they dance
And they laugh and they ****
Till the rancid sound of the accordion bursts
And then out of the night
With their pride in their pants
And the ***** that they tow
Underneath the street lamps
So what rude words have they blanked out? ‘lust’ and ’sluts’
In the next verse, they blank out ‘pisses’
Talk about ruining a great song. Crap!
What a retarded example on the screenshot.
We dont need another lyrics site
lolzzz….
the Yahoo censorship is sure to ruin some fun.
I’m eager to explore it and see what “NEW” are they doing.
Very nice – to see Yahoo! cursing –
– I mean after all this time, Yahoo! has to be fed up with being behind Google
Am I the only one that has thought a karaoke feature has long been missing? Seriously, these music players should have timings of the music to the words, not JUST the lyrics. Come on! Not that I am advocating more karaoke, just that combining the words with the timing makes sense.
Usually I like Yahoo but they took musicmatch.com and ruined it…
this site offer free pills!
http://www.milf2007.com
From AppleInsider:
A proposed deal between Apple and digital media company Gracenote could soon see the iPod maker serve up song lyrics through its ubiquitous iTunes Store.
Chorus: She sings to him in his dreams (in his dreams)
and it never seems (it never seems)
to so bad
Verse 1: She was his only love
a gift from up above (up above)
her voice was like an angle her eyes
like on too it never occur to him why’d he be so blue
Chorus: She sings to him in his dreams (in his dreams)
and it never seems (it never seems)
to so bad
Verse 2: She was driving down the street
(down the street) in a storm of snow and sleet
(snow and sleet) during the snowy night it was
the light that brought her fright when it came to
an end she’ll never wake again
Chorus: She sings to him in his dreams (in his dreams)
and it never seems (it never seems)
to so bad
Verse 3: Ever since that night
his only fear is a light
he lives in the dark
can’t stand but a spark
his heart was forever scared
as he sat there in her yard (Both)
So are all these lyrics 100% accurate? I guess that’d be the only benefit of this site. Also kind of ridiculous in an image, what if you wanted to copy and paste a portion of the lyrics?
It really lacks Lyrics
Nice feature as for me
i hate this website!!!! i want a website that i can add my own lyrics too and look at other ones that other people have posted. so make 1!!!!!!!! idiots!!!!!!!
BLOOD FLOW
VERSE 1
I heard a cry just saw tear drops fell on my laps,hang on da life,for the g-strips,cost me holla the name for the young nigga on the street,saw blood plot flow,hearing the sighs, strippas and the bitches calling the name mr paul help this mohter fucker diserve to live (heard a child cry) baby don’t cry dad is gone to the sky uploaded ghetto,”oh no haering the sighs again” loading the buggage on my back, feel havy, go down like a torn wind breaking the house to crash the bond into four-five peices///
CHORUS
i feel sorry, i feel sorry blood flow for you to be alive
i feel sorry, i feel sorry blood flow for you to be aliive
(backing voices)blood flow…uh…uh…uh,blood flow ooh yeah!
VERSE 2
i’ve got young nigga on the beat, ask me too many questions, get real to know how death hurt(heard young nigga cry) he got strong tips roll scroll my brains gave me a gun to do it i just pray not to loose a life coz blood flow for me to be alive, get deazy soft like a pussy ask mamma not to cry coz your flesh part who is gone is doing well on the sky uploaded ghetto,….words that i had broke me look back 22 september 1999 wake on the comma to won my life back, but i did’nt choose GOD decides, i cant drod the rain from falling apart, get abroad the nwes, read magazine newspaper, heard about arbotion,i’ve got a portion for futas to be alive,some said i was born into pain, anger, mostly raised by my self, but blood flow for me to be alive………written and arranged by phumudzo paul muswede. for more information call 0786967583 or e-mail phumudzopaul@yahoo.com
VERSE 1
Have you ever met a boy?
That was as cute as can be
Were you in love with him?
And thought about him non-stop
Did you get jealous?
When he was talked to other girls
Did he love you one day?
And then ignore you the next
Did you think it was a game at all?
Did a day come?
When he randomly decided
To just be friends?
CHORUS
Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened?
If you would’ve stuck together
Would you of been together until the end
All old and gray
And still in love that day
Would he of always stayed beside you?
And never let you down
Would you be as happy as you were?
Before he broke your heart
And would he of loved you all of your days to come
VERSE 2
Did he smile at you?
All innocent and sweet
Did you believe it?
And never thought it was a con
Do you wish you could’ve moved on?
And found some other guys
Do you wonder how you got caught up in this mess?
And now you feel dumb because you would’ve never guessed
Can you continue on?
Will you ever forgive him?
For what he has done
Because now sometimes it’s hard to have fun
CHORUS
Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened?
If you would’ve stuck together
Would you of been together until the end
All old and gray
And still in love that day
Would he of always stayed beside you?
And never let you down
Would you be as happy as you were?
Before he broke your heart
And would he of loved you all of your days to come
BRIDGE
Sometimes you wonder what you did wrong
The relationship went on too long
You feel like no one understands
You tell them that you’re still in love with him
So they tell you to get back together
But it’s not that simple
They just don’t get it
No one does
And they ask you why you’re upset
And all you say is because…
CHORUS
Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened?
If you would’ve stuck together
Would you of been together until the end
All old and gray
And still in love that day
Would he of always stayed beside you?
And never let you down
Would you be as happy as you were?
Before he broke your heart
And would he of loved you all of your days to come
that totally happened to me! i luv those lyrics! ur amazing! i can so relate! the guys name wuz Brendan! ugh what an effin jerk