News

Legal lyrics online

Have you ever tried growing tired of scouring the internet for the lyrics for your favourite song-of-the-moment? And once you found it, it turned out to be filled up with blatant errors? Or it turned out to be located on a site that would fill your entire registry database with adware, spyware and vira while blaring offensively explicit x-rated adult material from various ad banners on top, beneath and on both sides of the lyric? Or, more often, both?

Yahoo has recently set up a collaboration with Gracenote, to deliver song lyrics to the demanding masses. Correct lyrics. Lyrics that come without harmful destroy-ware. Lyrics from an evergrowing searchable database located at music.yahoo.com.

Gracenote was until a few years ago known exclusively as CDDB.com, a name which will have many people recognize them for delivering increasingly accurate tracklistings for software CD players. Knowing Gracenote's track record so far, there's reason to hope that this new cooperation will result in the end-all be-all online lyrics database, full up with words ready to be copied straight to your mp3s, your lead sheets for your band class, or where ever else you wanna use them - or...?

No. For the one thing that makes this a futile attempt, possibly doomed to die before even really starting, is the fact that the lyrics cannot be copied. They can't even be marked, and the bitmap they come in can't be saved to disk using ordinairy web browsers. Of course, this is to protect copyrights, but then --- what's the point, really?

Jason Fry from the Wall Street Journal demonstrates the new facility and asks the same question in this video: