Recommendations for a good music lyrics search engine?

January 14, 2004 1:46 PM

Recommendations for a good music lyrics search engine?

While Google usually does the job, I was wondering if there were any good lyric search engines/resources?

Last time I looked, all that was available were pop-up/banner ad farms that dispensed everything but lyric searches. What happened to all of them?

posted by jca to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

AllTheWeb. Seriously. For some reason, most lyrics sites out there are shocking pop-up/spam havens, on par with warez and porn sites, with no actual content. AllTheWeb is just a standard web search engine, but it has the advantage of being good at finding exact text matches, unlike Google that can sometimes discard "common" words, or rearrange words at a whim.

Go to alltheweb.com, type in a small part of the lyrics you're searching for inside quotes:

"I'm shaking like milk"

And bam result number 7.
posted by Jimbob at 1:53 PM on January 14, 2004

At one point in time Songmeanings.net was a decent lyrics resource, it seems to have faded over time, but a letter on their site says to expect their return sometime soon (granted I don't know the date of the letter), but if they ever do return I'm sure it will once again be a good resource
posted by mhaw at 1:58 PM on January 14, 2004

Yeah, Google.
posted by johnnydark at 2:13 PM on January 14, 2004

Again, if I'm searching based on a lyric I'd go with Google. If you want to search/browse artist/title/etc. this comes to mind.
posted by trillion at 2:25 PM on January 14, 2004

as it happens, i've been thinking about this question too. another question:

where do the sites that do have lyrics actually get the lyrics? can you buy a database of lyrics?
posted by o2b at 2:26 PM on January 14, 2004

btw: http://lyrics.astraweb.com/ gave me a spy/malware prompt, similarly most of the other sites do as well.
posted by o2b at 2:28 PM on January 14, 2004

[not an answer]
This is one issue that sorely makes me hate the RIAA and their lawyers. Years ago this used to exist perfectly fine at Lyrics.ch, but then it got blasted out of the world ( story1, story2, etc )

Apologies about not having any better answer than google or run spam blocking, but it just angers me.
posted by rudyfink at 2:36 PM on January 14, 2004

A good source for "alt-country-whatever-that-is" lyrics is altcountrytab.com.
posted by notsnot at 3:06 PM on January 14, 2004

Leo's Lyrics Database is pretty amazingly extensive. It doesn't have everything but it's never failed me (since I know other places to go for Mountain Goats' lyrics)
posted by nelleish at 3:08 PM on January 14, 2004

I've been using MMMDI for a while. Pretty thorough, adequately fast.
posted by Aaorn at 3:30 PM on January 14, 2004

As rudyfink notes, I believe all the lyric sites of any genuine usefulness were threatened with legal action and shut down a couple of years back (I haven't checked those recommended above, so there may be a couple circumventing this).
posted by rushmc at 5:39 PM on January 14, 2004