Comments on: Recommendations for a good music lyrics search engine?

Question: Recommendations for a good music lyrics search engine?

jca — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:46:24 -0800

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?

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:53:58 -0800

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.

By: mhaw

mhaw — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:58:05 -0800

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

By: johnnydark

johnnydark — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:13:34 -0800

Yeah, Google.

By: trillion

trillion — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:25:29 -0800

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.

By: o2b

o2b — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:26:19 -0800

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?

By: o2b

o2b — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:28:33 -0800

btw: http://lyrics.astraweb.com/ gave me a spy/malware prompt, similarly most of the other sites do as well.

By: rudyfink

rudyfink — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:36:32 -0800

[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.

By: notsnot

notsnot — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 15:06:53 -0800

A good source for "alt-country-whatever-that-is" lyrics is altcountrytab.com.

By: nelleish

nelleish — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 15:08:34 -0800

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)

By: Aaorn

Aaorn — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 15:30:49 -0800

I've been using MMMDI for a while. Pretty thorough, adequately fast.

By: rushmc

rushmc — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 17:39:09 -0800

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).