The Internet has revolutionized how we discover music, offering a variety of ways to stumble across new songs and artists. LyricSift is one of them. LyricSift is like StumbleUpon for song lyrics. It presents you with random sets of song lyrics, plus information about the artist and album. If you like the lyrics, you can learn more about the artist on iTunes, Amazon.com or Last.fm. Then, if you want to share the lyrics, you can post a link to them on Twitter. iPhone users looking for a way to kill time may also appreciate the company’s iPhone app.
LyricSift has a attractive, easy-to-use interface. The lyrics are user submitted, so there may be some errors-for example, for Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” they had the line “People think I’m insane because I am frowning all the time,” as “I am browning all the time.” However, they do have a system to flag lyrics with grammatical errors. They do not edit for content, probably to avoid getting caught up in disputes about lyrics from artists who don’t publish their lyrics.
The concept is innovative-while there are plenty of sites out there that compile song lyrics, this is the only site I could find that presents them to you randomly instead of letting you search. The question is, how useful is it? Here’s where I have a problem. There’s no way to specify what types of music you like or don’t like. Yes, lyrics are important, but so is the music behind them.
For example, just because someone likes the Johnny Cash version of “Hurt” doesn’t mean they are going to like the original Nine Inch Nails version (although I do like both). Same lyrics, completely different sounds. If you were going to use LyricSift to discover new music, that could be a problem. So, it would be nice if there were a way to specify what types of music you do and don’t like-or even just to rate the recommendations you receive, like you can with Pandora.
What do you think of LyricSift? Is it useful to you?
Our Rating of LyricSift
Categories:web
Tool of the Day: Discover Song Lyrics With @LyricSift http://su.pr/2iYmTo
Thanks for covering LyricSift! Just wanted to drop in and explain a few things… Right now LyricSift is only random, as our database isn’t super large yet. There isn’t much of a point to building a search/browse feature until we have enough to make it actually useful. It is in the plans, though!
We are also going to be building in music previews that will hopefully bring in multiple versions of a song, so if you like the lyrics and a song has multiple versions, hopefully you’ll be able to find/preview/buy a version that you will like.
The original idea behind LyricSift was to enable discovery of new music based on their lyrics… there are plenty of places that already recommend music to you based on the artists you already like, which in my experience brings you a bunch of music that sounds like the music you’re already listening to… We’re trying to go about it from the opposite direction and introduce you to songs that you may not have heard but which you’ll love the lyrical content of, and then we’ll enable you to find a version of the song that fits your musical tastes if there is more than one version. Stay tuned!
Hi Richard,
Cool, I can’t wait to see how it turns out!