Musixmatch Blog

You can now stream all your favorite Apple Music hits with lyrics from Musixmatch

Love Apple Music? So do we and the latest Musixmatch update comes with the Apple Music integration.

Starting today, you can connect Musixmatch to your Apple Music account and stream all the music you love with lyrics on the top without leaving the app.

Start now.

Update the Musixmatch app and connect your Apple Music account to start streaming your favorite songs, your saved playlists or any song from the Apple Music library with synced lyrics right within Musixmatch. iOS 9.3 Required

We’re happy to introduce you the new FloatingLyrics for Android.

It now supports Pandora, Apple Music, Line, AWA, Gaana and many more music players.

To get the best out of the new FloatingLyrics you need to allow Notification Access permission.

You will be prompted to enable it as soon as you open the app, simply follow the steps and you’ll be ready to sing along to any song you’re listening to.

Find more details here

NOTE: We use the Notification Access to be able to know what music you’re currently playing and provide you instant lyrics, we will never make any other usage of that permission.

We’ve also redesigned how we display the lyrics, enjoy a new more visual experience with a bigger font! 

Big news! We're very excited to announce that the Musixmatch Channel has officially launched on IFTTT and and it opens up a bunch of different possibilities to combine your Musixmatch activities with your favorite apps and devices. If you’re unfamiliar, IFTTT stands for: “If This Then That” and it’s a simple way to automate interactions between your favorite apps in a way that an action from one service triggers an action at another. Here are some fun examples and useful combinations of how you can use IFTTT with Musixmatch:

TO GET STARTED:

1. Sign in to IFTTT.com

2. Activate the Musixmatch Channel

3. Start using existing recipes or create your own to to enhance your Musixmatch Experience. It's that simple!

We have launched a few key Recipes for you on our Musixmatch IFTTT channel and IFTTT recipes are being added all the time.

We are thrilled to announce a delightful surprise: Musixmatch 6.0 is here with an epic integration!

We teamed up with Spotify to bring our huge lyrics catalog to the endless world of music, now even on mobile with the Musixmatch app.

Starting from today you can connect your Spotify Premium Account with Musixmatch and stream your favorite tracks with synced lyrics, have a quick access to saved playlists and Spotify's entire music library, without even leaving the Musixmatch app.

Today we are thrilled to share the new Musixmatch 5.1 with a whole slew of improvements and that worths twice. Yes, because our two apps are getting bigger at the same time!

Let's get deeper:

New look

We introduced a new home screen experience that takes everything you care about at your finger tips! 

Exploring your music collection is just a click away and we make it easier than ever to identify music playing around you through the new Music ID, now at the top of your home screen with a more fun animation.

Alesso – Heroes (we could be)

My most important job, before being a founder and entrepreneur, is that i’m a husband and father of 2: Alice (11) and Francesco (4 months)

My 11 year old daughter Alice has always asked me so many questions about musixmatch and I couldn’t always find the right way to answer.

A few days ago, sitting in her room, we were playing a Q&A game. She was the only one allowed to ask questions and I had to respond.

We needed to enhance our identity, to create a new wider vision and at the same time I realized that the real source of inspiration was the team.

When I joined Musixmatch 2 years ago (Oct. 2012), I knew that one of the the main goals was to improve the way people enjoyed lyrics creating the best possible experience. Easy?

No.

Musixmatch was already available on mobile, desktop and inside Spotify desktop app offering synced lyrics on every song.

We gave new lynph to music redesigning the experience starting right there.

We created a good design thanks to the continuous analysis, UI, Hack Days, Brainstorming and users feedbacks, taking care of typography and visuals. A really nice lyrics experience that become educational.

The ‘X’ and the Musixmatch experience.

In the meantime, we had a crazy experience showing our logo inside the key views of the apps as the welcome screens, the socials assets and communication in general that inevitably led us to use the logotype “musixmatch” instead of the big X.

For example with the favicon for tabbed browsers and with one of the big feature inside our apps that is the MusicID.

The process

1. Analysis

We have an awesome team that search, identify, analyze, collect, develop, sync and connect data as Lyrics, Artists, Albums, Songwriters, Music, Meanings, Influences, Inspirations around every single part of a lyrics and all their relationships.

Oh, there is much more around lyrics!

2. Identify Features

I identified the elements that allowed the development of a visual language and later to create a key to understand: squares, waves, lights, shades, connections.

Every aspect of our experience suggests the features for the new logo:

Data — Searchability of a resource in terms of speed and accuracy;

Lyrics Catalog — The depth of informations;

Artist — Personality that differentiate an artist from another;

Source — Shades like Echo.

3. Develop a Vision

All the elements cooperate complementing each other for the world’s largest lyrics catalog.

Our New Logo

Full of shades, always in sync.

After 2 intense months I have learned that you have to test the logo 1000 times instead of 999, but also that you should not put it under discussion once you decide. If you know the rules you can break them.

“Be nice, work your ass off.” — S. Sagmeister

Follow our design team at Musixmatch . _

All  started when Max Ciociola, CEO of musiXmatch, contacted me through my personal website, writing to me: “ Frank, we have to talk!”. I thought immediately that it was about a new project as i was a freelance. But suddenly i realized it was not about that.

At the time I was in a pretty particular situation: I was in contact with a Boston based startup i was working remotely for.

They wanted me to move to the USA. America. Oh yes After their lawyer contacted me to arrange all the Visa docs Max invited me to visit musiXmatch's office in Bologna (fucking coincidence!)

So I packed and went for a trip to Bologna.

Arrived in Bologna, after a regenerating shower in the hotel gently offered me by musiXmatch i went in their offices  located exactly under the very famous Asinelli tower. 

I met Max, long blond hair, similar to Jaime Lannister of Game of  Thrones, dazzling smile and very happy to meet me. I was too..

I already knew Max as one of the most known people in the Italian digital space: certainly this was one of the reasons for which I accepted the invite to visit their office...

After a long talk about musiXmatch and its strategy and vision, i was told by Max "We'll pay for a B&B or Airbnb in the while you find the right place for staying. Take your time. In the while tell me all devices you need and pls make a list of all your needs"

Was amazed about their hospitality and how quickly they want me to join the company.

So i joined the company. And i'm so glad i met this amazing team. Yes we've built a dream team actually and lots of amazing things are coming out and that's so exciting for me.

So i guess you want to hear: "Stay or leave to the US?"  I think moving to USA is getting pretty complicated because of all VISA issues and on a quality of life perspective being very honest Italy is not comparable with USA.  musiXmatch is a worldwide company with traffic in more than 120 countries and has WE say on our website is "Proudly Made in Italy but enjoyed everywhere"

That said..i've been part of musiXmatch since last 2 months and i'm excited as i've met the most talented team of my life, 30 people and more ... highly committed on building something cool, enjoyed by 30 million people so far in the world. 

Back to the topic "Italy ? Can you make it from there?" 

My response is YES. But you have to be cool and passionate.

Like all the team i met @musixmatch.

Dear Friends,

On Monday April 7th, a major vulnerability called "Heartbleed" had been discovered in the technology behind Internet encryption i.e. OpenSSL.

This was immediately addressed by the OpenSSL group and the main concerned parties have already updated their infrastructure. Even though musiXmatch does not handle nor store any sensitive data, all our peers do, thus we and one of our service providers (Amazon Web Service) have upgraded and patched our infrastructure.

Our updated infrastructure can now interact safely with all the counterparts used by our applications (Twitter, Facebook and Google+).  We have not yet encountered any issue related to this vulnerability in the musiXmatch apps. However as a precautionary measure, we strongly advise you to logout of Facebook or Google+ from the musiXmatch app, restart the application and then login again using your favourite social network.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email [email protected]

We are offering the chance to be one of the FIRST, and one of the very FEW people who will get the opportunity to Intern at musiXmatch for our Summer Internship.

This won’t be like any others Internship, we’re talking about Italy, spend the summer in Italy, being in Bologna, just 27 min from Florence and 1 hour by Venice and 2 and half from Rome.

More than all ....just 40min from the beach. Yep.

London, 31 Jan 2013 - musiXmatch, the app featuring the world largest lyrics catalog, just hit the milestone of 10M users, all on mobile. musiXmatch, the second most used app on Spotify, also announced another fresh round of investment of 3.7M dollars, raised by current investors Micheli Associati and Paolo Barberis, former Dada’s founder.

"We’ve built the largest and official Lyrics database that, combined with our audio matching technology and  synchronized lyrics is a unique experience for music fans. Many users say we’ve cracked the karaoke experience as people want to sing and read lyrics while listening to music anytime" said Max Ciociola, CEO & Founder of musiXmatch.” We are now aiming at the second screen & TV experience, and we are going to announce something very cool during the next World Mobile Congress in Barcelona”

Today is a big day here @musixmatch. We've been working to keep the music discovery and lyrics experience better and better for years and we're pretty excited about our new Spotify launch.

Details are below.

London 3rd December 2012 - It is well known that lyrics are one of the most important pieces of content in the music space. Searching for lyrics was in fact probably our first kind of music discovery, when we used to buy CDs and browse the booklets to read song lyrics and sing along to the music.

Whenever people search for an artist on Google, they primarily do that in order to search for lyrics (see Google Trend http://bit.ly/SZlSXf ) and it is no coincidence that word ‘lyrics’ is among the most popular words submitted in search engines  (source Google http://bit.ly/Suk8GY ).

Spotify users love lyrics too.

We love hacking and hackaton. And we started musiXmatch from there. Here a Guest post by @mutlu82 and @frasiocht, 2 hackers who built an awesome project based on musiXmatch API

Tuner.io was created over 12 hours at a hackday held by the great team at Mashape. It's a website that looks at the lyrics of songs in the Billboard top 100, counts words and overall sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and then organises the most popular results using the APIs available from Musixmatch and Text Processing. We focused on some key areas such as profanity and love, hoping to draw some conclusions from the data about what type of songs make up the top 100.

The idea came from a discussion about 'What really makes up a rap song these days?" and whether it was possible to show common elements to rap songs automatically. This idea then expanded into looking at the entire Billboard Top 100 and using all this generally overlooked data to analyse songs in a new way. It's really interesting take on music, but we're only scratching the surface.

There's some real potential with Tuner.io, especially if we add the ability to show trends over time. For example how much has profanity increased in songs over the last 20 years? Have songs been more positive or negative during the financial crisis? What type of song is more likely to get into the top 10?

Now for the technical part:

Tuner uses the MaShape API distributer to utilise a number of services to achieve it's goals of Lyrical sentiment analysis. Initially we make a call to Musixmatch to retrieve the current billboard top 100. (The billboard top 100 changes every Thursday at 12:00 EST, Tuner will update weekly to reflect this).

Once we get all these tracks we then do separate calls for each to retrieve the lyrics (again from Musixmatch). We also use the Text Processing API service to gather the sentiment associated with each song. This API returns Negative, Positive and Neutral values associated with the lyrics. While this is going on we explode the song lyrics and sort them against preselected values representing Profanity, Love, Sex and Materialistic features. The results are then presented as an HTML page containing integration to Spotify's Javascript hooks and additionally their pop up player.

Voila!

We had a lot of fun making Tuner.io and can't wait to take it to the next level, thanks to all the guys at Mashape, Musixmatch and Text Processing for your support!

Today is an amazing day here @musixmatch.

We’re so happy for what we’re announcing. We’re so happy for all our users and fan in the world. We’re incredibly happy to had the chance to work with such an amazing company like Spotify.

So proud of such amazing team we’ve @musixmatch.

Thanks for all the love.

Max

CEO & Founder musiXmatch

London - 15th of June 2012 musiXmatch, the world’s largest and official lyrics service launched today the new musiXmatch Spotify app which lets users discover the entire Spotify’s catalogue by simply searching songs by words and lyrics and gives the opportunity to Spotify users to sing their Spotify Playlist thanks to the power of the SyncNSing® technology. SyncNSing® shows automatically to all Spotify users the lyrics of the song they are listening to in real time or let them synchronize their own lyrics with the songs playing on Spotify with an easy tapping tool.

Singing with friends has never been so easy, social and fun!

You forgot that song’s name and you can only remember few words of it ? No worries, musiXmatch now identifies the song through a powerful lyrics search engine based on more than 6 million lyrics, currently the world’s largest lyrics Database licensed through worldwide partnership with Major Music Publishers like Sony ATV, Emi Publishing, Universal Publishing, Bmg Rights, Kobalt Music and Harry Fox Agency. You can then build awesome playlist just based on lyrics!

By searching “google” users can now get a Playlist with all tracks having “Google” in their lyrics, here an example http://spoti.fi/IxclzR or by simply searching “Amsterdam” you can get a playlist with most of the track talking about Amsterdam http://spoti.fi/IxcCTl. That’s a new and unique discovery tool of music based on Lyrics!

Featuring more than 5 million users worldwide, musiXmatch is the top destination on mobile and connected devices for searching and identifying lyrics. musiXmatch Spotify App can be accessed directly from Spotify App Finder. The application is open to all Spotify users in all countries Spotify is currently active.

“We’ve built a music discovery service around lyrics which is unique. We’ve made an analysis and discovered 90% of people forget the song’s name but they remember lyrics. It happens to all of us.. And now all Spotify users can benefit from this amazing feature - Max Ciociola, CEO and Founder of musiXmatch - On top of this we’ve built the largest database of synced Lyrics making easy for Spotify users to sing with friends while listening to any playlist. SyncNSing®. It’s addictive.”

We are offering the chance to be one of the FIRST, and one of the very FEW people who will get the opportunity to Intern at musiXmatch for our Summer Internship.

This won’t be like any others Internship, we’re talking about Italy, spend the summer in Italy, being in Bologna, just 27 min from Florence and 1 hour by Venice and 2 and half from Rome.

More than all ....just 40min from the beach. Yep.

We know you’re talented, we know you’re smart and we know you’ve got a wealth of knowledge to offer us, as we do to you, so why don’t we learn from each other?  We can’t promise there won’t be a little photocopying or a bit of toilet cleaning (we all do that, starting from our CEO), everyone has to pull their weight right? There will however, be so much more!   Our business is growing fast, musiXmatch apps are enjoyed everywhere in the world but sometimes, important projects get left as no-one has the capacity to take them on, projects which could make a real difference to how we operate, that’s where you come in!

We’re looking for enthusiastic, well-educated individuals with a passion for music and an ambition to go far, just like us. You should be studying for your Bachelors Degree and looking for an internship where you can achieve something to set you up for your future career.   You will work on a project for 3 months (May, June and July)  and be mentored by the team to achieve an awesome result. 

If you act well and put good effort you’ll be our guest for August too and enjoy Italy during Summer…well … that is kinda of experience sometimes in your life you have to make…

This could be in our Content, Marketing, and more than all Development area and working close to all our engineers.

It will be hard work, but you will enjoy the challenge of putting your academic experience into a REAL work environment.

What we will offer:

- a seat in our wonderful and brand new musiXmatch HQ  - a flat n Bologna to share with some others being part of the Internship  - Coffee, Coffee . Not the Starbucks one. The real one. The best one. - Food, food, and what a food. Have you ever heard about food in Italy? - 3 months of challenging experience working closely with all the team of one the coolest startup in the music space   If you fit the bill, are eligible to work  apply now here , your first challenge will be the application, like us, it’s a little different! Go on, click the button, but make sure you do it quickly and by Friday 20th April as we won’t accept applications after that date!

When it comes to communicating a milestone for a startup active in the music space by just 2 years, whatever it is it's always exciting... Both for us spending night and day coding (and how many nights!) both for all our users. If you happen to walk down the street and see people using musiXmatch or when it happens to go to a concert and to see a group of boys and girls singing with an iPhone in their hands, using the musiXmatch apps..... .....well it makes you feel satisfied and happy.   Reading thousands of messages and feedback where people say "Thanks. Now I can finally read lyrics without googling anymore..."   Make us happy.   3,000,000 users worldwide access now to the world's largest lyrics catalog ever created and developed by musiXmatch thanks to the worldwide licensing agreement with Top Major Music Publishers like Sony ATV, Emi Publishing, Warner Chappel, Universal Music Publishing, Kobalt Publishing, BMG Rights, Harry Fox Agency.   They do this through the mobile and desktop apps powered by musiXmatch.   We are pleased and proud, and as  Lyrics market  is  still tough, with hundreds of  illegal sites that provide lyrics without paying a single $ to Songwriters and Music Publishers, we are happy to be the preferred choice for the user who wants to sing..... anytime....and anywhere..   We celebrate today during Mobile World Congress 2012 our biggest milestone with the launch of the new musiXmatch Player on Android, an innovative player that allows you not only to look inside the largest lyrics database but especially to discovery new music, to identify Lyrics at any time from TV, radio and any music source... thanks to the powerful technology  MUSIC ID powered by our friends at Gracenote.   Soon there will be updates on Iphone and many other news ..

It's a long road and  this is just a beginning for us. One thing is for sure, we want everyone to use musiXmatch in the world. We want anyone to sing thanks to musiXmatch. We want to make happy as many people as we can.   3,000,000 people have made us happy today.   Thanks for all the love you gave us. And do not stop following us.

Max Ciociola

CEO & Founder