News

Lyrics May Come to iTunes

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 1:10 PM - by

Yahoo recently announced a deal with Gracenote to offer song lyrics through its online music service, but it looks like the agreement won't be exclusive. Gracenote, formerly known as CDDB, is in discussions with other digital music providers including Apple, according to Reuters.

Gracenote CEO Craig Palmer commented "We wouldn't be in the business to launch just one service, so stay tuned."

He added "We think we can build a really healthy business for lyrics and I think publishers stand to gain quite significantly from this new revenue stream."

Song lyrics is a feature many have been waiting for at the iTunes Store for some time. Support for the feature is already available in iTunes: The application can display lyrics, and each track an iTunes library contains an information field specifically for song lyrics.

Currently, the only way to attach lyrics to songs is by finding the lyrics at unlicensed Web sites that host user-provided content. In some cases the user-provided lyrics are inaccurate, which is a problem the official and licensed lyrics at Gracenote don't suffer from.

Mr. Palmer didn't say when to expect to see song lyrics show up on the iTunes Store

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KitsuneStudios said:

member since 25 Oct 2001 with 2450 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Apr 25, 2007 4:46 pm

This would be VERY cool! Especially if you could search songs in iTunes and the iTunes Store by lyric.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:49 pm

Lyrics would be very cool, but what I miss the absolute most (since I now buy nearly all of my music as a digital download) is liner notes. I hardly ever used an LP's or CD's liner notes to check out lyrics, but ALWAYS checked out the other stuff, primarily producer, engineer, musicians, an artist's thank-you's, etc. I know you can get some of that technical info from All Music Guide http://www.allmusic.com, but I do not always take, or have, the time to do so. It'd be cool to have it download with the music I buy.

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