25 Mashups for Music Lyrics

John Musser, January 19th, 2009

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With last week’s Mashup of the Day winner LastLyrics, you now have your choice of over two dozen web mashups about music that also integrate song lyrics. If you look at this list of 25 song lyrics mashups, you’ll see that most of them make use of either one of the 2 lyrics APIs we have listed, one from LyricWiki.org and the other from Lyricsfly.

We currently have 11 LyricWiki mashups and 11 Lyricsfly mashups. These mashups are some of the most complex we see in terms of number of APIs used. Many use 4-7 different web service APIs to pull in photos, videos, reference data and streaming music.

The LastLyrics mashup is a classic example, it combines the LyricWiki API and the Last.fm API to let you type in the username of any Last.fm user, and immediately get back the lyrics for many of the songs on that person’s playlist.

Of course copyright issues around lyrics are often contentious, and these services are no exception. Here’s a note from the LyricWiki FAQ:

We spend a significant amount of time contacting publishers and running a system to compensate them for the songs they have rights to publish with royalties. It is clearly impossible to make sure we have them all, however our efforts certainly qualify as due dilligence. Even if a publisher has not responded to our attempts to contact, they can at any time stake claims to their artists and we will remove their work. LyricWiki is also one of only three lyric sites to pay royalties to publishers.

There are now 44 music APIs and 230 music mashups in our directory. Use our Music API and Mashup Dashboard to see the latest in this space and our Music Feed to get the latest music-related APIs, mashups and news via RSS.