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Too many holes in LyricFind for iPhone

It's a nice idea--an iPhone application that lets you look up song lyrics. Unfortunately, there are way too many gaps in LyricFind's database.

Matt Rosoff
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff.
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Matt Rosoff
2 min read

LyricFind has been trying to compile song lyrics into a searchable database since 2000, and after a few years of failed negotiations with rights holders, the company is finally getting some traction.

Earlier this month, it released a lyrics app for the Slacker RadioPlus service. The Web site has never been much use: it only lets you search on snippets of lyrics to try to find song matches; I'm much more interested in entering a song title to get the full lyrics for that song.

Pink Floyd "Echoes" = fail. The right result showed up in the fourth position, but when I clicked through, it wouldn't let me see the lyrics.

So I was excited when I heard that LyricFind was releasing an iPhone app that is supposed to do exactly that. The interface looks promising enough--there's a space to enter the song title and artist name, and a search button. Unfortunately, in my tests, it failed more often than it succeeded. When it did succeed, the correct lyrics were often buried several places down in the search results. A few times, it appeared to find the right match--such as with Pink Floyd's "Echoes," where it found a David Gilmour version of the song--but wouldn't let me click through to the full lyrics, probably because of a copyright issue. Other times, it appears to have pulled lyrics from random Internet sources that are not exactly authoritative--the matches for R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World As We Know It" are obviously wrong in a few places, for instance.

For now, it might be worth checking out the free ad-supported "Lite" version, but I can't recommend paying $3.99 for the ad-free version. I'll check back in a few months to see if they've improved the results.

LyricFind has also released a free Facebook application that not only offers lyric searches, but also lets users create quizzes, dedicate songs to their friends, and contribute lyrics to the database--maybe I'll start by uploading my own version of that R.E.M. song.

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