As part of its broad-sweeping plan to make the internet more convenient and/or totally monopolise information, Google will soon be displaying music lyrics at the top of its search results pages when you search for a particular song name plus “lyrics”.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the change to TechCrunch in a statement referencing ‘Stairway to Heaven’, writing, “There’s a feeling you get when you turn to a song and you know that the words have two meanings. Well it’s whispered that now if you go search the tune, maybe Google will lead you to reason. Ooh, it makes you wonder…”
The system will work in much the same way as it currently displays weather forecasts and sports scores when a particular city plus “weather” or team name is entered, and will likely reduce the number of visits you make to your favourite lyrics sites such as Genius and AZ Lyrics, which often rank highly in Google Search.
The move follows a similar change that Microsoft made to their Bing search engine earlier this year. The tech giant added a feature that similarly saw song lyrics returned above search results when a song title is entered, as part of the company’s efforts to compete with Google’s Knowledge Graph.
But as TechCrunch reports, there’s an ulterior motive to the new change than simply making Google more convenient. The addition of song lyrics to the Knowledge Graph only shows longer snippets of a song’s lyrics, with a link directing users to Google Play for the complete lyrics.
In other words, this is a case of Google promoting its own content — in this case, its own music store — above search results that would direct users to third-party websites, which has got some involved in the so-called “lyrics industry” a little worried about the future.
According to Darryl Ballantyne, CEO at LyricFind, a company that licenses lyrics to third parties like Pandora, SoundHound, and Shazam, some websites that rely on placing their pages high in Google’s rank system will likely go away with the new changes.
“However, many sites also build community around the lyrics, which Google won’t replace,” Ballantyne added. “Sites like SongMeanings and MetroLyrics are more than just SEO farms; I expect they’ll continue to post impressive traffic numbers.”
