How to Find Lyrics and Songs on the Internet

Maybe you've heard this song on the radio that you just love , but the DJ never seems to tell you what it's called, or who it's by. Or maybe you know the name of the song, and it's one that you love to sing along to, but there are just a few words in the chorus that you can't quite understand and you want to find out what they are.

It is very easy to search for both lyrics and song titles on the Internet, and in this hub, I'm going to detail how to do it and some things that you should watch out for.

If you know some of the lyrics to a song, especially if you heard the song on the radio, you should be able to find the name of that song by doing a search on the Internet.

The first thing you should do is type what words you do know into your preferred search engine (I use google) and then add the word 'lyrics' at the end. Then hit search.

If that does not bring up the song that you are looking for, the next thing you should do is put the lyrics phrases that you know in quotes. For instance, if you know the words from the first line of the song and one line of the chorus, you should put one set of quotes around the words in the first line, then another set of quotes around the line from the chorus. If you are unsure about any of the words that you think you know, put quotes only around the words that you are absolutely sure about. Then, again, hit search.

It should be noted that not all songs have had their lyrics put up onto the Internet (children's songs are particularly tricky), so if the above doesn't work, you might try calling the radio station you heard the song on, or posting to message boards to see if anyone else can help you.

If you are trying to identify a song that you heard on Satellite Radio (Sirius or XM), DogStarRadio.com is the place to visit. The website compiles play lists for nearly every satellite radio station on Sirius and a good portion of XM, too, and their lists are searchable by channel, day the song played, and time of day.

As with searching for song titles, when it comes to searching for lyrics, the quotation marks are your friend. If you know the name of the song, you are going to put that in quote marks, add lyrics to the end of the search, and then hit 'search.'

Again, not all song lyrics are going to be online, and as most of the lyrics are user transcribed, there may be errors in what you pull up.

Many lyrics websites are rife (and I mean completely saturated with) pop-ups, spyware, and viruses. If I can avoid it, I never click on a direct link to a lyrics website. Instead, when using Google, I click on the 'cache' link located below the main Google link. The 'cache' link takes you to a snapshot of the page taken by Google at some previous time, and as you are only using the snapshot, you avoid many of the problems associated with lyrics websites in general.