If you're anything like me, you've spent a decent chunk of your life listening to, discovering and going to see bands play music (350+ shows and counting). I'm one of those walking encyclopedias of random music trivia and would probably be a certified genius if all the space in my brain currently taken up by song lyrics were replaced with actual useful knowledge. While it's the entire package contained in each song that I love, my first focus when a new song catches my ear is the lyrics.
Back when I was an 8 year old Mtv devotee, I had to diligently wait by my boom box with a blank tape at the ready for my favorite songs to be played on the radio. Once captured on tape, I would rewind-play my way through each section as I took down the lyrics so I could learn the entire song. While the advent of the internet has made learning the lyrics to new songs infinitely easier than it had once been, it's still been a less-than-ideal experience given the pop-ups and spammy feel of the majority of lyrics resources out there on the web.
That is, until now, thanks to Bing (to learn what this means for adCenter advertisers who can advertise alongside this new feature, skip ahead to the bold “Potential Opportunity for Advertisers” header below for more information).
Let's take my most recent lyrical acquisition as an example: The other day, a friend and I got into a conversation about the music we grew up with, which morphed into a discussion on what we're listening to now. During the course of that conversation, she asked if I'd heard of The Ting Tings. I had, in fact, heard of them, but had yet to hear a song by them. She recommended I check them out, and I made a mental note to do so.
The following day, I logged in to take advantage of my Zune Pass and searched for The Ting Tings. After checking out a few of their songs, I settled on "That's Not My Name" as the one I liked best... it's got a certain oh-Mickey-you're-so-fine-you're-so-fine-you-blow-my-mind-hey-Mickey cadence that makes that inner 8 year old boom box listener bob her head in approval. Couple that with the gradual energy build from the bridge onward and I was sold. My next step was to check out the lyrics.
I popped on over to Bing and searched on "the ting tings lyrics"; experience has taught me that it's easier to find lyrics to multiple songs by the same band if you keep your query broad as most lyrics sites will bring you to a page that offers links to their entire catalogue (and I did intend to look over the lyrics to the other songs on the album). Here's what came up:
Not only could I click on any of those little triangle play buttons to listen to the songs (if I weren't a Zune Pass subscriber and hadn't already heard it), there were links to lyrics right there after the song timings. Much to my delight and surprise, clicking on them brought up a page--still within the Bing user interface--laying out the complete song lyrics. No pop-ups, no spammy ads and no risky sites (more on that later):
Just as I had hoped to find in keeping my search broad, along the left nav were links to lyrics for The Ting Tings' other songs. How cool is that?!? So yeah, like the title of this post says... awesome experience for music lovers like myself; two thumbs way up!
Keep in mind that lyrics on Bing is a brand new feature and there's still a lot of ground to cover in getting the database populated, so don't expect to find links for lyrics to every single song out there right off the bat. For those there ARE links for though, it's a far superior experience when compared to constantly being greeted by a pop-up asking you if you'd like to get the song you searched for as a ring tone for your cell… not to mention a whole lot safer and more secure than visiting the lyrics sites you’ll find in most search engine results pages.
NOTE (for my fellow music lovers): A recent report from McAfee, The Web's Most Dangerous Search Terms, gives a really helpful overview of the risk factors involved with particularly “dangerous” search terms that can result in serving up “risky” pages on the internet. The report found that categories with the worst average risk profile were websites dedicated to song lyrics (5.1%) and the categories with the worst maximum risk profile were lyrics keywords (26.3%). If you were to land on one of the riskiest search pages for a typical lyrics search, one of four results would be risky in terms of the potential for malware, whereas finding your lyrics on Bing with this new feature means you don’t have to worry about any of that. Make a habit of checking Bing for lyrics first and you’ll be greatly reducing your exposure to those other, riskier sites.
Lyrics on Bing: Potential Opportunity for Advertisers
According to our partners in Bing Marketing, music related searches make up about 3% of all queries on Bing, and a large portion of that 3% contains the word "lyrics". In the image above, you'll notice a graphic and link to sign up for a Zune Pass. Just below this link and in the mainline above the lyrics (as shown by the blue box in the first image) is prime advertising space to be populated by adCenter ads.
If you were the owner of a music store or perhaps a local ticket broker, your ad letting users know that you have The Ting Tings merchandise or tickets to their upcoming concert for sale would be right at home here. Because queries leading to the lyrics page often contain both artist names and song titles, it's a best practice to bid on both Broad and Phrase match for artist names.
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