Lyrics on Digital Services

Lyrics have become an important aspect of online music consumption. They are used in a variety of ways to increase fan engagement and aid discovery. For example;

• Spotify, Apple Music and Shazam all have features built into their apps to display lyrics directly to users.
• Instagram allows lyrics to be posted creatively into stories along with music clips.
• Google integrates song lyrics directly into search results, helping potential fans find songs where they may not know or remember the song title or artist.
• Voice activated devices such as Amazon Alexa let users search for songs by lyrics.
• Lyrics can also be considered by the machine learning algorithms which streaming and radio services use to establish mood metadata. Mood data is used for recommendations, playlist selection and/or to target appropriate advertising (leading to increasing revenues).

Kudos does not currently store lyrics or deliver them to digital services directly. Digital Music Services generally work with a third-party platform to source the data for their song lyrics features. By far the most prominent song lyric platform is Musixmatch which powers all of the services mentioned above.

In order to supply lyrics for these services, artist teams should sign up directly with Musixmatch to become a Musixmatch Verified Artist. Download and follow the guide for instructions.

If you can’t find a brand new release on Musixmatch…
If you follow the new release procedures outlined in the documentation but are then unable to find a track on Musixmatch by the end of the Saturday following release, verified artists can send requests for priority tracks to be added directly to artists@musixmatch.com – including a Spotify or Apple Music link for the track.

If you can’t find an older track on Musixmatch...
Make sure you’re registered as a verified artist then login with the verified artist account and submit the lyrics for your track.

If you can find your track on Musixmatch but it’s not appearing on the Instagram stories lyric sticker feature…
Contact us and we’ll ask the Facebook Music team to investigate.