We’ve all been there. A classic song gets stuck in your head, but all you can remember is, “Boom, Boom, Boom let’s go back to my room, na na na na na na na na na na na na na.”
Technology to the rescue! Bing wants to take some of the hassle out of the age-old agony of remembering song lyrics.
Microsoft recently announced that solving this problem is now as easy as typing the song name and “lyrics” into Bing. The search engine will then show the complete lyrics for the song in its search results page.
To start, Microsoft is including 500,000 songs in its lyrics catalog, with more to come over time. Although Microsoft didn’t announce this, the company’s lyrics appear to be supplied by LyricFind, a lyrics service that has licensing deals with all four major music labels.
The story behind the story: Google and Microsoft are competing heavily to supply basic information within search results instead of directing you to a third-party site. This can include flight schedules, local weather, current time in cities around the world, and so on. Assuming Google follows suit, song lyrics in search could get rid of some of the “cruft” of the Internet by reducing the vast number of websites supplying song lyrics.
Look back, not forward for lyrics
Taking a quick perusal of Bing’s lyrics feature, you’re more likely to find older songs than current ones. Getting lyrics to songs by Taylor Swift or Katy Perry was not a problem.
Song lyrics in Bing. (Click to enlarge.)
But other big songs right now such as Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, Maroon 5’s Animals, and Echosmith’s Cool Kids were no shows.
Not just lyrics
Bing’s lyrics search is an extension to Bing’s revamped music search, which was re-equipped with Xbox Music integration back in May. In addition to seeing the lyrics in the results column, you’ll also see an information box on the right including artist biographical information, related searches, and list of other songs by that artist.
Click on the play button for song from the list, and you’ll be send to Xbox Music’s Web Player where you can hear the music.
Although Bing’s lyrics feature is relatively small, it will inevitably grow if people find it useful. That will also mean Google is more likely to follow suit. While a Bing-Google lyrics battle would threaten many random sites that exist purely to serve lyrics, it probably wouldn’t impact sites such as Rap Genius that annotate song lyrics to supply background information about popular songs.