In today's world, many people turn to the internet to find information about any subject that one may think about. One subject that is increasing in popularity is searching for full music lyrics to all and any genres of songs. This is fairly simple to accomplish with a simple search in Google, but some people worry that in the very near future, this may or may not be changing.



Yahoo recently announced a new feature that would allow users to search music lyrics from their site. Yahoo has obtained licensing for tons of artists from many different record labels. In exchange for the allowed use of the music lyrics, Yahoo provides a portion of all advertising revenue gained from the site to the artists and record labels.

Some owners of other music lyrics websites have worried that Yahoo's new system will take away a large portion of their site's traffic. One website I contacted even suggested that they would have to take an additional approach, such as offering a new mobile-based lyrics system for cell-phone users, in response to the loss of advertising revenue due to Yahoo's new music lyrics system. Additionally, some lyrics websites are disallowed from posting lyrics to certain artists or bands due to copyright issues. Yahoo's system is an attempt to get around this problem and offers music lyrics to any song the user would want to search for.

While Yahoo's approach is an elegant solution, there are still a couple of drawbacks to their music lyrics system. Part of the deal agreed upon by Yahoo and various record labels include the requirement for all lyrics to be in picture format versus pure text. This is mainly to prevent users from copying and pasting the text of lyrics and to prevent online robots from crawling their webpage with the sole intent to steal the text of the lyrics. This also has a drawback, as mentioned above. Since the lyrics are in picture format, search engines will not be able to see the text in the lyrics, and searches where users enter a verse from their favorite song will not return a result from Yahoo's system.

Yahoo's music lyrics search also suffers from the fact that the "typical" internet user just doesn't know about it. With Google being the current king of search engines, a good portion of internet users have no idea that Yahoo offers such a system. These users will continue to search for music lyrics as they always have in the past, through a typical Google search. This, coupled with the fact that 90% of search engine traffic comes from Google, will mean that although Yahoo's system is a nice approach, many online music lyrics websites will not be as heavily hit as some once thought after Yahoo's announcement. One thing is for certain: unless Yahoo takes over as the king of search engines, most users will continue to find music lyrics online in the same fashion they have used in the past, through Google.