Sources for legal free sheet music lyrics

Finding lyrics to your favorite song on the Internet is no big deal any more.  Most of the time all you need to do is do a Google search for your chosen song and then sift through a few pages of junk to arrive at what may, or may not, be accurate lyrics to the music you were looking for.

{mosimage}Sources for legal free sheet music lyrics

Finding lyrics to your favorite song on the Internet is no big deal any more.  Most of the time all you need to do is do a Google search for your chosen song and then sift through a few pages of junk to arrive at what may, or may not, be accurate lyrics to the music you were looking for.  In this regard, the Internet is a cornucopia of free music lyrics, but the problem is that probably 99 percent of these sites are operating illegally without licensing the lyrics they are posting.  In short, music lyrics are copyrighted, just like the audio that accompanies them.  When a web site posts free sheet music lyrics without a license they leave themselves open to being sued, although few are ever prosecuted. 

Free Music Lyrics Through Legal Sources:
At this time there are only two real web sites that have legally licensed all of the lyrics that they offer.  Not so strangely these two sites are two big names in the music retail arena, Yahoo Music and Gracenote.  At both of these sites you can rest assured that any lyrics you find are accurate (as is often not the case at many other sites) and that the lyrics are legally paid for (by the company).  Yahoo and Gracenote provide the free music lyrics to you and they foot the bill for them.  To clarify, Yahoo is totally free while Gracenote provides the ability for other publishers and software makers to bundle free legal music lyric access with their products.

Other Sources Of Free Music Lyrics:
For quite some time a man by the name of Walter Ritter published a piece of software called PearLyrics that allowed users of the popular iTunes audio player to display lyrics as their song was playing.  Mr. Ritter's very modest little application was in some way threatening to the publishing establishment and he had to take down the software under threat of legal action.  A few months later the company apologized to Mr. Ritter (under pressure from the EFF), but the software has yet to return.

The story above begs the question, why then if Ritter's software (which searched public web sites for the lyrics to the song that was playing in iTunes) was so quickly threatened then why do other music lyrics software makers such as the strangely named EvilLyrics still go on unchallenged?  Fair or not, the days of free music lyric web sites appear to be numbered.