If a band doesn’t have lyrics on their website, isn’t there a place anywhere that has decent lyrics? Anywhere?
I was trying to figure out some words to a song the other day (Smokin’ Bowl by the Real McKenzies), and did a lyrics search on Google. All the usual suspects came up: lyricsondemand.com, lyricsmania.com, mp3lyrics.org, plyrics.com… The first one I checked had a few things that didn’t sound right, and I didn’t trust it because of misspellings and lack of capitalization. So I checked the next site. Same errors, also all lowercase. Ditto the next site. And the next one. And the next one. One site credited the lyrics to some dude named Justin. The others didn’t credit them at all.
I’m assuming here that somebody sat around the house one day, guessed at the words to the song, and submitted them to a website. All the other sites copied them. Is that pretty much it? Is there anyplace that actually verifies lyrics or gets them from the bands?
Gah, the worst example of this I know of is a Steeleye Span song I one attempted to find the lyrics to - the long version of Montrose. All of the lyrics sites I could find were filled with horrible errors, ones that did not even make sense.
I got a bad virus from a lyrics site. I had googled the song name +lyrics and clicked the link.
I saw the lyrics. Then Norton pops up with several quarantined files. It didn’t stop everything. Virtual Monde is nasty. Malware Bytes would clean it and it was back days later. I eventually had to format and reinstall windows.
I’d love to know the name of a lyrics and tabs site that is considered safe. I love music and enjoy looking at lyrics.
A Wiki would be a good source. The most accurate lyrics are posted by fans from the album’s liner notes (cd booklet). Otherwise, it’s a matter of posting what they “think” they hear. At least with a wiki, others can correct any errors.
I’d hoped but do a search and you might find this too often:
yes many lyrics sites are laden with Malware , and lyrics searches are obviously big businesss on the web but most sites are illegal as lyrics are often heavily protected by copyright restrictions and the real expense of displaying them legally seems too much to have a free definitive extensive legal site…
I knew the guy who started the Lyrics Server at UWP, which was the precursor to Lyrics.ch. He did it to try to get enough traffic to force the university to upgrade their connection (which was a 56k line at the time).
The wiki covers just about everything. They’ve done a great job. I’m keeping this site bookmarked.