This is assuming, of course, your band has a domain* and website to begin with, and not just social media accounts.
If you search for “[artist or album] lyrics,” most of the results you get won’t be on web properties belonging to the artist or even their record label. They will be lyrics-harvesting websites like Genius, Dark Lyrics, or AZLyrics. If you’re a top-tier artist, you may get coverage with listicle type of blog posts, leeching off of your material in the first page of results. A Google search** for Taylor Swift lyrics results in USA Today’s “Taylor Swift’s 80 best lyrics definitively ranked” as third in the results listing. To make matters worse, there’re barely any Taylor Swift lyrics on there.
Artists might make lyric videos for their songs, and repeat the lyrics in the video description. That can be effective (I like Haste the Day’s “World” lyric video), but you’re on Youtube’s turf and they can take back their turf whenever they want. Same with Bandcamp and Soundcloud. They are streaming sites with allowance for lyrics but you’re ultimately setting up shop on rental properties. By the way, zillions of other artists have set up shop next to you, and they’re competing for the same morsels of attention you are.
Sure, you could post lyrics on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (I’ve seen it), and TikTok, I guess, but those channels are horrible as a repository for evergreen content, one of the rubrics that your lyrics would fall under. Social media runs high time-preference behavior: newer content is the focus, older stuff is ignored unless someone is looking for something vaguely controversial, so your lyrics will be hard to find. Don’t forget that AZLyrics and the like are waiting in the top Google searches for your lyrics, despite how many lyrics you tweet out. Don’t forgot on those sites that your content squeezed in with other artists way more popular than you, popups, irrelevant links, ads, ads, ads. More ads. Just…no.
To compound the problem, those lyrics-harvesting sites also like to phone in third party content from the likes of Wikipedia or an news API service to give the lyrics context. What can be worse is that the lyrics pages themselves can suggest corrections or leave comments. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’ll be very easy for someone to speculate incorrectly about what the lyrics are about. When you actually own your content, on your own website, under your own domain, you can give the correct context and there won’t be any mistaking that it’s the official story. “Lots of folks are saying this lead track, ‘Pistons and Pissed Offs,’ from our debut album is about ergonomics, but it’s really about hydraulics. Water power rules!”
Here’s some good examples of artists providing lyrics on their sites:
1. Meshuggah has their lyrics, sorted by album.
2. Michael Jackson, too.
3. Rush as well, even liner notes
4. U2 also has their lyrics sorted by album, by default, when you select “Music,” but there’s a subnavigation menu item for all their lyrics, all in one place.
5. Eminem has lyrics in his top-level navigation!
Here’s some top-level artists, and some not-so-top-level but well-known in certain circles, who surprisingly do not have lyrics on their websites: P.O.D., Madonna, Guns N’ Roses (missing an omitting apostrophe as always), AC/DC, Elvis, Demon Hunter, Mastodon, Snoop Dogg, Judas Priest, Korn, Britney Spears. Likely countless more…
* My friend Seth W from Close Mondays talks a lot about this, though he stresses email lists moreso. If you’re an artist, you need an email list, too. Social media is like smoke, but an email from “[email protected]” is the actual fire…which is you, not a huge social media website.
** Yes, Google itself probably has a hand in throwing those lyrics sites into the top search results, but if we’re honest, no one who is looking up lyrics is gonna use DuckDuckGo, Yandex, or Startpage.
2 Comments
I’m in that tiny minority who uses DuckDuckGo for hunting down lyrics. The search results tends to vary between lyrics sites from song to song, and with various artists. I’ve learned not to trust one or two, and to look farther down the results for something more likely to be accurate. From time to time, I do see the band’s own site listed, and for explanations that is by far the best source.
Straight from the source is usually best, yes. I just wish more artists took the time to make it available on their own web properties, if they even have them at all. I really think the way social media is used it making people’s creative work too transient, as they rely on the “latest-latest-latest” model of , instead of building an archive of what they’ve done in the form of some kind of website.