I’ve been wanting this for years. Yahoo’s music store has teamed with the Gracenote database (where iTunes downloads track names/details from whenever you import a CD) to download lyrics whenever you purchase a song. There are literally hundreds of lyrics sites on the internet, few of which are reliable, and all of which have disgusting, ad-ridden layouts. But finally, one of the big players in the digital music industry is putting all those lyrics together into one source that (supposedly) is official and correct, instead of searching through a dozen different versions of a lyric before finding the correct one.

Honestly, iTunes should have been doing this for a while now - they even have a “lyrics” section in the info for a song which is never used, since no one wants to go search for, copy and paste lyrics into iTunes which may or may not be correct. Still, it will be a while before Yahoo has lyrics available for most of their songs, and I think we’ll be hearing reports of gross inaccuracies for years to come. Nevertheless, it’s a step that had to come, and I’m grateful it has.

Oh, and you know how Digital Rights Management is getting thrown out on a lot of music download sites in the near future? Well, this is taking us a step back. That’s right, the lyrics contain their own DRM software, which means you can’t simply copy and paste the lyrics to another source. Record Industry: what are you afraid of? People learning the correct words to a song? Let people post the lyrics wherever they want to. If your goal is to create a difinitive database for music lyrics that is accurate, there shouldn’t be a need for people to get the lyrics anywhere else than on your site. Besides, all that would happen is people would post your version of the lyrics on fan message boards and other lyrics sites - exactly what is happening right now.

That was entirely incoherent, but I can’t type any more.