Google Adds Song Lyrics to Top of Search Results,Points Searchers to Google Play | Hacker News Reader

Google Adds Song Lyrics to Top of Search Results,Points Searchers to Google Play

techcrunch.com

41 pointsbitsmith25 comments

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What a shame that the mentioned lyrics sites like these are going to lose traffic:

* http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ledzeppelin/stairwaytoheaven....

* http://www.songlyrics.com/led-zeppelin/stairway-to-heaven-ly...

Slow loading and each sporting giant ads that pop from the side of the screen and cover up the lyrics.

Compare to Google's fast, minimal version: https://play.google.com/music/preview/Thhet5jtvzdxkti7vc62o2...

Good job Google.

Well, in New Zealand that link gets "Lyrics not available", so I wouldn't consider it an improvement.

This feature doesn't appear to be in AU/NZ search results yet.

Maybe there's a copyright issue at play here.

Finland too. Might be US-only?

Anyone could have created a lyrics site like Google's, except for the cost of licensing the lyrics.

I wonder if Google negotiated terms with the record companies, or they are simply able to pay the licensing cost with profits from Google Play.

There are other ways to license lyrics:

http://www.lyricfind.com/services/lyrics-for-free/

"What’s the catch, you ask? Simply place LyricFind’s ad code on pages containing LyricFind content. Let us monetize the pages and worry about meeting the licensing costs"

Interesting.

On my machine your Google link was significantly slower than the other two.

it is not all about speed in this case. the Google version has no features, you cannot discuss the song, and no other web 2.0 type of features.

which actually kind of surprises me that Google wouldn't take this opportunity to inject some kind of Google+ comment box within each lyric, so that users can comment on each song.

This feels like the same vein as Microsoft abusing it's monopoly to distribute IE in the 90s. I don't know what Microsoft's market share was back then (seems around 75% according to [1]), but Google's is around 68% [2] at the moment which puts them in a pretty good position to drive traffic wherever they feel like. Some might say this is their prerogative, but the same argument could have been made for Microsoft back then. Since Bing is doing the same thing[3], we have the two major search engines both potentially killing off song lyric sites and the businesses behind them. Whether this is ok or not is not as interesting as where all these structured data additions will take us. Will it see the death of curated content sites (like the lyric sites) in favor of the search behemoths having their own content databases, or will we see a resurgence of these sorts of sites with new ways to discover them?

[1] http://news.cnet.com/Windows-95-remains-most-popular-operati...

[2] http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google-search...

[3] http://searchengineland.com/bing-starts-showing-full-song-ly...

Microsoft's desktop market share by 1998 was 90%+.

Here's an amazing press release by Microsoft (reprinted newspaper article), acknowledging it (when they were still trying to defend their success rather than redirect the message off of it):

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/9-16mrktshare.mspx

This move by Google is in the vein of Microsoft eating its ecosystem, which is something every dominate platform will always do to some degree. That predates the Internet Explorer bundling.

Over the span of two decades Microsoft either purchased or built into Windows, dozens of products that used to exist stand-alone.

Google will do exactly the same thing, and they will increasingly take flak for it. Google let everyone know they were going to do this, many years ago. Any simple data / facts / snippets they can provide that act as fast answers to common queries, they will build into the top of results.

Not sure why this isn't the top comment. I'm glad others are thinking about this.

The post makes negative implications on a company that will do whatever it wants with search results, just as it always has and just as we've trusted them to do for at least the last decade.

In my mind, this isn't news.

This article is from 3 months ago!

relevant - list of business models Google search could kill:

http://www.elite-strategies.com/list-businesses-google-searc...

Which is presumably why rap genius is moving on to become a universal annotated knowledge database instead of staying in the lyrics business.

That was always the goal of rap genius, ever since the very beginning.

Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted. I was Facebook friends with the founders since 2011 or so and saw how "Genius" was intended to be a framework for annotation of more than just lyrics: they were actually trying to gear it towards news, education, and various other things. It wasn't just an internal thing either; back in 2013 they claimed to have been in contact with with Fortune 500 companies about using the platform[0] for what I guess is documentation, and also suggested they might take annotated books and sell them [0]. They were openly discussing their plans to expand "Rap Genius into Everything Genius" after the Andreessen Horowitz investment [1]. This is barring my personal conversations with the founders and even my Facebook message pitch of expanding into education in Australia a few years ago.

[0] http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-pitch/29-old-gets-15-mi...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/23/rap-genius-co-f...

Are there decent people in this world at all?

Doesn't this hurt Google? Now there are fewer people seeing its ads.

Can the extra purchases on the Google Play really make up for it? I suspect not.

2 reasons to look up lyrics:

"Ooh, what song was that?" -> lyrics -> link to buy song.

"I want a good thing to quote on Facebook" -> other people look it up -> listen -> maybe buy.

The former might give a decent return (compared to showing ads to the 95% of people who wouldn't buy the song but would have seen ads) - keep in mind they're already primed for finding (and getting) the song.

> Ooh, what song was that?

You have to know the name already, and be listening to it. You can't lookup lyrics by tune (there are tools that do that, but not this).

Main reason to look up lyrics: I have the song, but I have no idea what the singer is actually saying, i.e. no sale involved.

I've absolutely listened to a song on the radio, or heard it while out and looked up the lyrics. Although actually typing out the first bit makes me see the limited (and still fading) utility of that scenario.

Or, alternatively, search for an unknown song by a snippet of known lyrics.

"here's a truck stop instead of saint peter's"

Sale might ensue.

Isn't it interesting that we have reciprocal use-cases?

It's very interesting!

But I tried your search, and while it found the song, it didn't have that special panel.

But when I searched for:

"r.e.m. man on the moon lyrics"

That panel came up.

So while yours might be an interesting use case, that are not actually doing it.

So my initial question, still stands: Doesn't this hurt google?

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