I’m looking in adding lyrics to Musicbrainz. Several lyric sites are allowed at MB.
But which is the most reliable / “best” site to add lyrics and link them to MB afterwards?
I see LyricWiki is mentioned at a few topics in the forum.
Does someone knows this topic a bit more in detail?
I have not used them all, but when I’m looking for lyrics myself, the first stop is usually Genius.com The nice thing about that site is that users can annotate lyrics (or even books). It’s been online for quite a few years now, so I guess it’s stable enough.
I believe most if not all lyrics sites depend on user submissions and for some artists or even genres some sites may have a lot more data than others while for other artists & genres it’s the other way around. If you’re submitting the lyrics yourself just choose the one you like working with the most.
I never added lyrics anywhere, but as a user I personally prefer genius too.
Thanks for your fast feedback.
One more point is which site is also most supported by music software?
It does not seem that Picard tagger sets the lyrics URL in the first place.
What software are thinking of?
I can’t answer which site works best, but in general using lyrics in applications is a difficult topic. The lyrics pages are often operating in a grey area legally. E.g. LyrcisWiki in its beginnings used to have an API that applications could use to get the lyrics from the side. But they got some legal pressure and were force to remove it. Nowadays they provide only a small snippet of the lyrics.
There are some companies offering full programmatic access to lyrics, but they usually charge a rather high fee to do so. For non-commercial and open source applications that is realistically impossible to handle. Even if one would be able to pay the high fee you would still be required to keep any access tokens to the API hidden, which is basically impossible for a open source application to do.
There are a lot of lyrics websites out there. A lot of the ones in Musicbrainz’ whitelist are defunct, outdated or no longer accept new submissions.
-Genius is good but it will take you some time to figure out all of the features that you have access to as a Verified Artist submitting your own lyrics.
-LyricsWikia is good as well but be warned that the moderators on there are just as bad as on Wikipedia. You will need to have every page linked for them to not delete them, and they only give you a short window of time to do it. My suggestion is prepare all of your pages (song pages, album pages, band page, artwork pages) and then submit them all at the same time. Otherwise by the time that you’re ready to publish your second page, they’ve already deleted the first one.
-Musixmatch is decent enough and this one can be linked to streaming services like Spotify. It may be what you’re looking for, but as pointed out on this forum (in another thread), their database is really messy and they will not fix your albums’ track listing if there are errors.
-Songmeanings is one that I always used because fans can submit their own interpretation of the lyrics. I think the popularity of the website has gone down over the years though. This one isn’t whitelisted on Musicbrainz.
-Metrolyrics is another big one that shows up high on Google but isn’t currently whitelisted on Musicbrainz.
-Lyrics.com used to be the biggest lyrics website out there but they kind of ended up like Myspace after some bad revamping.
-Lyricfind was the big website that some years ago decided to pay royalties to songwriters for displaying their lyrics on Google and other streaming platforms but they went belly up. They no longer accept any new submissions and I don’t even know if their old database still works.
In the end, it comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish.
-Do you only want to have your lyrics on Musicbrainz-approved websites?
-Do you only want your lyrics on select top-rated websites?
-Do you want your lyrics available on as many websites as possible for exposure? If it’s this option, then just submit them to every “lyrics” website that pops up on Google.
Some days ago I switched to latest Picard development version (Version 2.2.0.dev1) and there is an lyrics plugin APISEEDS:
Fetch lyrics from Apiseeds Lyrics, which provides millions of lyrics from artist all around the world. Lyrics provided are for educational purposes and personal use only. Commercial use is not allowed. In order to use Apiseeds you need to get a free API key at https://apiseeds.com. Want to contribute? Check out the project page at GitHub - avalloneandrea/apiseeds-lyrics: A MusicBrainz Picard plugin to fetch lyrics from Apiseeds Lyrics!
Name: Apiseeds Lyrics
Authors: Andrea Avallone
License: MIT
Files: apiseeds_lyrics.zip/apiseeds_lyrics.py
So far I didn’t test it but will give it a try…
Thanks for all your input.
Sounds interesting, I will try that Picard plugin.
I’ve tested the Picard lyrics plugin. It works fine, but slows down the process of fetching complete tags for a release significantly.
I tag lyrics using mediamonkey it’s free and searches all the main sites
for me I use official JASRAC pages for japanese songs but they do have some western songs
On JASRAC there are lyricists but no lyrics. 
