Digital Home Thoughts: Yahoo Adds Licensed Lyrics to Service

"Most online databases of music lyrics are illegal--they reproduce copyrighted without payment. Worth than that, they're bad. Oftentimes, when I look up a song--usually by plugging a snippet of it into Google--I'm led to sloppy transcriptions that are rife with gibberish of the 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy ilk. Today, Yahoo Music has added a legit lyrics database--licensed from music data kingpin Gracenote--and while it's not the lyrics resource of my dreams, it's certainly a step in the right direction. Yahoo says it contains over 400,000 songs, so nobody's going to sample more than a small percentage of them. If you're me--and last time I checked, I was--most of them will be for stuff from the 1960s. The database clearly isn't anywhere near comprehensive--I saw the lyrics for only five Doors songs, for instance. But for most artists I searched for, there were anywhere from a few to many lyrics, and it's all integrated with Yahoo Music's other features. (You can look up a lyric, then buy the song if it's available.)"

I like being able to access lyrics to a song, so this is a welcome step in the right direction - even if it is only for Yahoo Music customers. What I'd really like to see personally is some sort of a plug-in for Media Monkey or even Windows Media Player that would inject the lyrics into the audio file as metadata. I've seen a tool like that for iTunes, but not for any other music tool. Anyone heard of such a thing?