#lyrics api

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 . _

Just 18 months young, and we've just returned home through the snow from our 2nd Midem. 

We wanted to say how excited we are with the buzz around musiXmatch. With our 2,6 mln app users, we have built a damn good database of lyrics covering more than 30 countries and 18 languages. But size doesn't matter if you don't have quality and that's why we love feedback, especially positive ones telling us how great our service actually is. Our mobile app is available on Android, iOS, Nokia, and Windows and our desktop app is available for both Mac and now Windows too. We're adding thousand of new users every day, so we think we're doing something right and making people happy.... but this is just the beginning...

You may have noticed that we just launched our new website. The site features a fresh new look, easy navigation, and all the information consumers, partners, and developers need.  We received a lot of feedback in all this months on how to improve the site and one theme was for a more consumer focused approach. So, for all you non tecky geeks out there, less jargon to figure out!  We always said that musiXmatch is The world's largest Lyrics Catalog so we have included a search bar where you can type in any lyric to any song and from our 6M large database and best in class matching ratios, we'll display the song you're looking for, instantly. No need to go Google and cross your fingers. LOL And as always, we continuously look to improve and everyone's feedback is welcome.

Thanks to everyone's support and keep on singing!

Matching is our business.

You should be able to throw the lyrics of any song at our database and we should be able to match it with the correct track and artist. Period. Everything else is gravy. So, if you know anything about this business, We're going to astound you with a little news flash.

We took every top 100 song on the official Billboard charts from 1946 through 2010 (that's 65 years of top 100 songs, kids) and verified that musiXmatch can match nearly 95% of those songs to their tracks and artists (well, 93.2923% to be precise). No other service in the world comes close. 

Here's an unofficial source of Billboard Historic Chart. (We can’t share the official one here because of contractual issues.)

This is not magic. We reached this milestone by mashing up four elements: (1) signing agreements with nearly all the major music publishers, (2) carefully ingesting the lyrics and music metadata into an intelligently structured database (3) adding a programmable fuzzy logic capacity to our search algorithm and (4) a whole lotta love.

The fuzzy logic implementation (discussed here in the developer support area) is especially cool. It means that we can match a track whether the input is “Billionaire by Travie McCoy Featuring Bruno Mars” or “Billionaire (feat. Bruno Mars) by Travie McCoy” without missing a beat. Take a look at this graphic, showing results with and without the fuzzy search.

This is just the beginning for musiXmatch. We founded our company only one year ago with a single all-consuming obsession — to create the world's largest fully licensed international lyrics database and to match it to 99.99999% of the tracks available in digital format. And we will get there. We despise phrases such as "not found", "your search did not match any documents" or "try different words". They make us nauseous!

We have matching in our blood, in our DNA, it's baked into our very souls.

We have assembled a fearsome team of co-founders and developers with a burning passion for all things music, and we are all hackers to the core. Together we have created a wickedly wonderful platform (fuzzy logic included) and a kickass API that you can get up and running quickly and painlessly.

The music business is finally showing positive signs of catching up to what the technology allows. It may be a tough slog, but we are committed to working with the other awesome startups in our industry to shine a beacon on the future of music. But we need you. We can't do it alone (and it wouldn't be as much fun) without you hackers, startups, artists and fans.

This is going to be a wild ride. Watch this space!

  Let's say you're out somewhere and you hear a great song playing on the sound system but just as you're getting into it, the tune ends. And now you're singing the chorus to yourself and trying to figure out how to identify the song and artist.  Here's where our hero comes in. Frank is the creator of SongVoodoo. Send a simple mobile text message (SMS) of the lyrics snippet to +1 917 934 3979 and get back an immediate response with the name of the track and the artist. For instance, send Go shawty its ya birthday and SongVoodoo sends you: That song is In da Club by 50 Cent. Simple, right? And powerful.  Song lyrics are the poetry that surround us everyday as we go about our lives and now there's an easy way to identify and discover those new songs that are getting into your head! Once you know the name of the song you can even send an SMS to listen to a clip of the song to get you singing again. Just send the text #play Michael Jackson billie jean and you will get a call back playing a clip of "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson. Sweet ! SongVoodoo is built on the API's of three wonderfully hacker-friendly companies, Twilio (for the SMS/text features),  7digital for the music clips and our own musiXmatch for the lyrics and was built during MusicHackday in NYCFrank has just gotten started, as he says :

This has sparked an interest in understanding the lyrics space on the web, seeing if there are other ways in which I can expand SongVoodoo to serve the lyrics needs of people online."

musiXmatch Launches Commercial Beta of the Largest Commercial Lyrics API, Provides Developers Worldwide Access to more than 5 Mln authorized Lyrics 

  CANNES, Midem – Jan 24, 2011, musiXmatch, the leading provider of digital lyrics solutions, today announced partnerships with BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Sony ATV Music, giving musiXmatch the largest authorized lyrics database in the world. Launching today, the musiXmatch commercial beta enables online music services to increase user engagement and SEO traffic using lyrics, empowering developers to legally create, monetize and distribute the next generation of fully interactive music applications.

  With over 5 million lyrics available, musiXmatch is the only lyrics API to fully provide international rights management, enabling developers to quickly and easily integrate real-time lyrics into music services around the world. musiXmatch is currently used by hundreds of developers worldwide, and is the only lyrics service to offer an affordable pay as you go business plan.

  “We are happy to support musicXmatch with their initiative to legitimize and develop our lyrics business. They have created the first truly open platform for developers to quickly and easily integrate lyrics into their music applications. This will be of benefit not only to us as publishers, but more importantly to our songwriters. stated Guy Henderson, Senior VP International for Sony ATV. “Through musiXmatch, Sony ATV will be able to provide lyrics to users of music around the world.”

The musiXmatch api team is pleased to announce that the Public Beta release is now available.

When musiXmatch api first launched we received a lot of attention from both corporate and small business about scaling our platform for a production environment with high peaks of traffic.

We always care about performances and stability and we keep working to develop a full scale monitoring platform and much more. 

During our private Alpha test we served millions of api requests at an incredible growing rate.  In the first decade of January we had already served 10X API requests than the whole December!

In this alpha period we've received many useful feedbacks to improve the service and we've optimized our platform to make it more stable.

In the meanwhile you have developed many nice showcases and some very interesting applications, we love you guys !

In order to help you more we've added with the Public Beta Release new support's source for you guys :

support.musixmatch.com New Forum, Support, Ticket's Request

New Twitter's API Support :

www.twitter.com/musixmatch_api

Welcome to the Public Beta API

Enjoy !

Dear musiXmatchers,

 It's been too long since our last update. We’ve been very busy shipping new features and content and there are tons of new developers hitting our API's, so it's definitely time to get back in touch. Please read the whole thing, even if it’s a bit long, because there’s a bunch of service-related news and updates that you need to know.

 But before I write another word, we just gotta say, we are feeling the LOVE!

Incoming love has been landing here in Bologna, Italy (musiXmatch’s world headquarters) from all around the music industry because of the way we are solving the technical and legal issues around the international digital distribution of licensed lyrics. There is a lot of creative energy out there and we feel like we're in right in the middle of it thanks to our partners, developers and friends like you.

 And we’re catching the love that has been pouring in from you guys in the developer community because you are groovin’ to our core service -- an easy to implement, scalable, robust and truly open API that gives you access to 100% legal, internationally licensed song lyrics. Wow. If you know anything about the music industry, you will say that again. Wow.

 Our definition of OPEN includes being open to you, so keep the feedback coming. Your suggestions, tips and hacks on the technical or business model of musiXmatch allow us to keep improving, and that means that your music-related business improves, too.

 At the SFMUSICTECH last 6th DECEMBER we announced some important international licensing deals bringing our grand total to more than 5 million addressable and fully cleared song lyrics available to you right now! And there's more where that came from in the pipeline. Hold on tight.

 OK. So. (Drumroll, please.) We're coming out of alpha and preparing the commercial beta release of the musiXmatch API in early 2011.

 Translated into plain talk that means that you will soon be able to build, distribute and monetize the lyrics-oriented features of your music apps without having to worry about legal issues. We've got you covered. And with more than 5 million songs in our lyrics database, your users are going to be treated to a great experience. And that's worldwide. That’s world class.

 Yup. Worldwide. There is nobody else addressing the tough business of international rights management, because it ain't easy. We were just crazy enough to try, and so far we're doing great, thankyouverymuch. :-)

  MUST READ: TECH UPDATES

  API News:

* brand new section for artists’ data* you can now search for songs by artist name or alias, convert an artist's musicbrainz_id to a musixmatch id or get the artist's charts for a given country.

* every artist-oriented API response includes the artist's alias when available. You can even search by "symbol". Try "O(+>" and you will get Prince in the response!

 * we've increased the number of countries with charts support, just check out the documentation to see the new ones.

 * we have added 2 very important fields in the track.lyrics.get API: lyrics_copyright and script_tracking_url. Both of them have to be included in your calls, so check the documentation carefully.

  ATTENTION: the 1.0 version of the API is being definitively deprecated. It is no longer being supported. BUT MANY OF YOU are still using it! Please upgrade immediately to 1.1, since 1.0 is going to be completely shut down on January 16.

  Find all the info you need, and our forums, in the developer zone.

 Last and certainly not least, we're growing and hiring new people to keep up with our ambitious plans. Interested? Send an email to info  @ musixmatch.com and tell us about yourself...

 Whew, if 2011 is anything like 2010, we're going to be releasing lots of lyrics goodness and offering more and more lyrics. Join us for the ride!

We wanna share with you some appointment to not miss :

   Calendar:

musiXmatch will be @ MIDEM in Cannes from 22-26 January, we'll have a booth in the OPEN AREA, so please stop by and say hi!

 Btw, MidemNet, the digital program at MIDEM, will host a Music Hack Day, actually 2 days, 23-24 January. Visit http://musichackday.org/ for more info.

  Ok, signing off, wishing you an AMAZING 2011 and Happy music-filled Xmas!

 This is our way to do it :

Keep up to date with musiXmatch via our media streams:

  mXm Blog : http://blog.musixmatch.com

Follow us on Twitter : www.twitter.com/musixmatch