Complete Music Update: Genius tries to get its lyric lifting lawsuit against Google reinstated. “Legal reps for lyrics site Genius were in the Second Circuit appeals court in the US yesterday seeking to get their client’s big old lawsuit against Google reinstated. They insisted that Genius had a legitimate legal claim against Google because the tech giant breached its terms of service.”
New-to-me, from XXL: Website Shows the Most Repeated Words in Any Rapper’s Lyrics . “There’s a new website called Repeeted that has counted every word a rapper has uttered in their lyrics and gives you the results within seconds. So far, the word cloud generator has analyzed nearly 300 million words from 985,119 songs by 22,119 artists across different genres including rock, pop and country. Rappers from the hip-hop world are featured in their database as well.” Lots of variations of the n-word on this page, just a warning. I tried looking up several Australian musicians I like. Ball Park Music, Alex the Astronaut, and Client Liaison were in the database, while Bluejuice, Miiesha, and Baker Boy were not.
Techdirt: Tom Lehrer, Still Awesome, Releases Lyrics Into The Public Domain. “Back in 2014 we had a post about Tom Lehrer and copyright. As you hopefully know, Lehrer, the unassuming retired math teacher, had a brief and massively successful music career, in part because all of his work is amazing. Years back, Buzzfeed had a fantastic article about Lehrer that is worth reading. That’s what spurred my post about Lehrer and copyright, because in the Buzzfeed piece it became clear that Lehrer did not care one bit about retaining his copyrights.”
Gizmodo: Spotify Adds Ability to Search Songs by Lyrics and Launches New App. “This week, Spotify is rolling out the ability to find songs by searching for their lyrics. It’s a feature that’s been a long time coming and it will undoubtedly become second-nature for users in no time at all.”
NewsChannel5 Nashville: App created as networking tool to connect songwriters. “Noah Cummins, a new artist who graduated from Belmont in 2018, struggled with making connections in the beginning. ‘When I first said, “this is going to be my career, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” it was hard for me to go like, “how I am going to talk to someone, and sell myself in 30 seconds,”‘ said Cummins. Now he’s writing with more experienced artists all thanks to an app called We Should Write Sometime.”
Music Business Worldwide: Genius Sues Google For ‘No Less Than $50m’, Alleging ‘Anticompetitive Practices’ Over Lyrics. “The company behind Lyrics website Genius, Genius Media Group Inc., is suing Google for ‘unethical, unfair and anticompetitive’ behaviour. Genius alleges that traffic to its site started to drop because its lyrics – which are annotated by its contributors – are being copied, and then published by Google via the tech giant’s lyrics partner, LyricFind.”
My Reddit filter tipped me to this new database of black metal music lyrics. From the GitHub page: “Database of Black Metal lyrics in .JSON format to be used for computer-assisted lyric analysis projects, collected from https://lyrics.fandom.com with additional metadata from https://www.metal-archives.com/ for my sociological bachelor thesis on Ideology and Black Metal.” There are over 11,000 songs in this collection.
How-To Geek: Best Sites for Finding Song Lyrics. “Have you ever discovered that you’ve been singing one of your favorite songs incorrectly all along? Instead of being embarrassed in front of your friends, it’s easier to use one of the lyrics searching website discussed below and find the actual lyrics of the song.”
In case an earworm is driving you bonkers: Top 7 Websites To Find Song Lyrics Online. “Can’t keep up the pace with Eminem’s rap? Or having trouble understanding what Beyoncé is singing? Or are you getting ready for karaoke? In these cases or another, song lyrics become essential for everyone: be it native listener or non-native. Indian listeners with a taste of English music use song lyrics sites to understand the core meaning of the song that they failed to grasp at the very first moment. Not even this, native English speakers widely use lyrics websites for sating their curiosity of the new words uttered by Eminem or Beyoncé.”
Google is now showing song lyrics in its search results. That noise you heard was ten thousand lyrics sites shutting down. “Looking to capitalize on the constant stream of people trying to figure out how does that song go again?, Google unveiled a new featured placement for song lyrics Monday. So, the next time you google the lyrics for ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’ Bonnie Tyler’s beautiful words will appear directly in your search results.” I found most of what I searched for, though Laura Love’s Capricorn and Hominy didn’t get any results, and Begin the Beguine showed the song as sung by Julio Iglesias – and the lyrics are in Spanish!
A new Web site is designed to make research and analysis of rap lyrics easier. “Actual Fact is ‘an exhibition of data visualization and critical writing produced with data extracted from rap lyrics.’ It employs the ‘Hiphop Word Count’ database, which creator and Lab founder Tahrir Hemphill describes in a video profile as ‘an online searchable database that analyzes the language in hip-hop and looks at hip-hop as a cultural indicator.’ It contains data from the lyrics of more than 100,000 hip-hop songs dating back to 1979.” I had trouble getting the site to load but I’m on Chromium, which can be wonky sometimes…
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