Reality Jockey has been out a couple weeks now and everything is going great! The songs have been getting airplay on CHIRP Radio (request a song now!), as well as Radio One Chicago, where I did an interview last week (audio coming soon). The album also got an amazing review in New City. More radio spins and press coverage to come. We’re only getting started!
This morning, my friend was listening to Reality Jockey on Apple Music and noticed that the lyrics weren’t showing up as they were for other songs on the platform. I did some quick research and found that Apple Music pulls from the Genius.com lyric database. I went to town and entered in all the songs.
The dashboard indicated that the database had previously been queried for some of these songs, which is great news! I created nice pdf of all the lyrics for the album’s USB release, so the task was just a matter of copying & pasting, then fixing up the formatting here and there. Also, the streaming services encourage including all the lyrics as sung, so I added in the “oohs”, “aaahs”, and “do doo do woahs” that I leave out when I print lyrics on the album sleeve, etc.
When I logged in to Genius.com, I was surprised there weren’t more lyrics of mine inputted in there- I swore I already did this for a bunch of other albums so the lyrics would appear when peeps are reading lyrics when they Shazam my tracks. Turns out Shazam pulls from a different database called Musixmatch.com, which I spoke about in an earlier blog post about gamification. I dug in and entered the whole album again into Musixmatch.
It dawns on me that maybe this is something I could have somebody else do. I’m not quite at the point where I talk to Columbia College about sending an intern over- but I am getting close. Part of me enjoys the leg-work involved in tasks like this, and also I’m able to have total creative control over how the lyrics appear across the different platforms. But it is time consuming and I wonder if my efforts might be put to better use elsewhere. Like I say, if things get nuts I’ll probably bring in somebody to handle some of the tasks that I can delegate. Thanks for reading!
EDIT: Just spoke to Susan over at Musixmatch. Here are the partner sites that use their lyric database:
Now I’m curious about what sites draw from that first service. Genius. I think I’ll shoot them an email. Frankly, I wish there were just one site I had to input all my lyrics in (200+ songs is a lot!), but the process is kind of fun. Hopefully it’s just Genius and Musixmatch I have to worry about. What’s that phone number for Columbia College?
