Yahoo Partners With Gracenote To Provide Lyrics For 400,000 Songs

Apr 24, 2007 at 8:07am ET by Barry Schwartz

Yahoo strikes deal to catalog lyrics online from San Jose Mercury News reports on Yahoo’s announcement that they have partnered with Gracenote to provide the lyrics of over 400,000 songs.

The general manager of Yahoo Music, Ian Rogers, explained that this partnership “fills a huge, gaping hole out there.” Since many of the lyrics sites out there have not formed licensing agreements with the copyright holders of the songs, the lyrics may not be 100% accurate.

Gracenote has negotiated deals with the thousands of publishers over the past two years. Yahoo will show ads next to the lyrics, sharing ad revenue with the owners of the copyrights.

Want to find the lyrics. Here’s how Yahoo says you’ll be able to access them:

Gracenote Lyrics are integrated into Yahoo! Music in three unique ways:

– Yahoo! Music Search – Consumers can search for lyrics from the Yahoo! Music Search box and receive highlighted links that take them directly to Yahoo! Music and the lyrics they want.

– Yahoo! Music Artist Pages – Each Artist section within Yahoo! Music offers a lyrics page, allowing users to easily browse all song lyrics for that artist.

– Yahoo! Music Top Songs – Consumers can quickly find lyrics for the most popular music today.

– Yahoo! Search – Yahoo! will be adding lyrics to its index, allowing users to search for and find lyrics from any Yahoo! Search box.

– Yahoo! Audio Search – Yahoo! users will soon be able to find links to lyrics pages through Yahoo! Audio Search, which helps consumers find music from a wide range of services, as well as non-music audio files from across the web. Audio Search will also provide the technology that will allow users to search for songs by typing in snippets of lyrics to find matching song titles.

Postscript: The Yahoo Music Blog has now posted more info on accessing the lyrics.

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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Philipp Lenssen

When can we test this?
http://www.atu2.com/ Matt McGee

Since many of the lyrics sites out there have not formed licensing agreements with the copyright holders of the songs, the lyrics may not be 100% accurate.

The worst place to get song lyrics is from the labels/copyright holders. They’re never accurate. The best place to get lyrics is from a dedicated fan site. On http://www.atu2.com, we have a guy whose sole responsibility is to put together the most accurate lyric transcriptions of EVERYTHING U2 has ever released. Dedication = accuracy. :-)