musiXmatch Redesigns Spotify Lyrics App
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
“Lyrics” is one of the most sought-after words on the internet – above even “MP3″ and “sex”:
As the below chart shows, “lyrics” reached maximum Googled-ness in 2006, but the term has now dropped below “sex” in popularity. Perhaps this is because several apps now let you search for lyrics in new ways, or even force them to play as you listen to music, the way one can with the top two apps in Spotify: musiXmatch and TuneWiki. The former relaunched today with a spiffy new redesign, allowing users of the free or paid version of Spotify to have lyrics play in real time along with over seven million songs.
Some songwriters and/or publishers don’t like their lyrics to be displayed within these apps (see example), which is why that number is only Seven million, covering under half of the music in Spotify. Still, it’s a great, humanistic use of technology to play lyrics along with music, which is probably why TuneWiki and musiXmatch are the top two apps in the Spotify App Finder today.
We came across all kinds of great songs with lyrics barred from the app, but when it works, it's great, especially if someone has taken the time to synch the lyrics to the music.
Occasionally, you’ll play a song that doesn’t have lyrics, in which case you can add them to musiXmatch yourself, so that they’ll display not only for you, but other musiXmatch-ers too. Likewise, if the app has lyrics but no knowledge of how to synch them to the song, you can teach the app to do that yourself by clicking on each lyric as it is supposed to play.
MusiXmatch isn’t just for watching the lyrics to your music go by. It also lets you search for shards of lyrics — whatever you heard in the disco, club, poker room, restaurant, or wherever else you were when you encountered that song you can’t get out of your head. You can also search by artist and/or song title.
In addition to this new, prettier version of musiXmatch, which you can try here, musiXmatch busted out some fresh usage statistics:
The musiXmatch Spotify app had 5.2 million pageviews in October 2012.
MusiXmatch has localized its seven-million-plus song lyrics into 32 languages (!)
In this view, I am adding the synchronization information to a song for which musiXmatch already has lyrics. I can use the mouse or cursor keys.
Overall, musiXmatch (on Spotify as well as the standalone musiXmatch apps) has more than eight million users.
MusiXmatch processes over 250 million tracks per month (by which we think it means user submissions).
If you’re looking for some new playlist ideas within Spotify, musiXmatch can also let you built a playlist from any search result. Like, if you want to make a playlist about hurricanes, you could do this.
