Remember the days when you purchased cassette tapes or CD’s and, while listening for your first time, you carefully unfolded the liner notes and read all the lyrics in their entirety? Reading the lyrics during each song always gave me a greater understanding of the music and the artist. I tried hard to grasp the song’s meaning and understand why the songwriter chose those exact words. What was Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” and why did it make a grown man cry?
I feel like I’ve lost that magic. Today I download everything and don’t have easy access to lyrics. One time I struggled to understand something (okay everything) Kings of Leon were saying, so I Google-searched the song lyrics and found them on some hacked up site that published them without permission.
Well those days might be over.
Recently, Gracenote sought and secured approvals from the five major music publishers to deliver licensed lyrics to music portals, online music stores, consumer electronics and mobile carriers. The possibilities could really enhance the digital shopping and listening experience, especially considering that Gracenote’s music recognition service powers iTunes, iPod, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Search Engine, Winamp, Napster¦and the list goes on.
Hopefully with this deal, we’ll preserve our old-school traditions when listening to music. It would really be great to read the lyrics to a song while listening on my iPod. I’m sure the rollout of a massive lyric database with the backing of all of the major music publishers will also lead to a huge crackdown on all of the unlicensed mom-and-pop websites posting lyrics without permission.
So many cease and desist orders, so little time.
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Very cool! Glad to hear someone is compiling it all for one site.
In my opinion, Lyrics from a song are not different from Poems or Storys in Books. I buy them, so why shouldn’t i have acces to them as i wish. and of course the Lyriks are inspiration.
The actors should decide and not the labels.
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