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February 29, 2008

Lyrics for YouTube's Music Videos

If you want to see a music video, there's a good chance you'll find it on YouTube. The downside is that YouTube doesn't offer any music-related feature, so you can't find information about the artists, lyrics or concert dates.

A simple Greasemonkey script adds one of these missing feature: lyrics. The script creates a container titled "Lyrics" below the video's description and shows the lyrics when you expand the container. Obviously, the video must contain the artist's name and the song's title. If the script doesn't find the lyrics of a song, change the site that provides lyrics or choose from one the alternatives.

As usually, to install this script you need Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.

5 comments:

  1. Hey guyz, are lyrics legal (publishing them online)? I cant find any reliable source regarding this question, but i suppose its not.

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  2. Don't know if they are precisely legal or illegal, but I do recall several lyric databases getting sued and shutdown. In a post RIAA world, just consider everything involving enjoying music to be illegal (by law or being sued) ;-)

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  3. In most cases, you're not allowed to post lyrics without asking for permission or paying royalties. All lyrics sites (except for Yahoo Lyrics and probably few others) post lyrics without paying royalties, as most of the lyrics come from their users. The situation is similar with YouTube's copyrighted content.

    Related:
    Gracenote lyrics
    Lyrics sites out of tune with copyrights

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  4. Another reason why Google Video is better :-) (Subtitles)

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  5. Now, with the new youtube api, someone oughtta be able to make a subtitle wiki and script for subtitles!

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