When Joris Kluivers (@kluivers on Twitter) set out to write his Lyrics app for iPhone, he never intended to personally take on Apple, Sony, and Gracenote. Kluivers, a student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, was just trying to get his foot in the App Store door, not go toe-to-toe with three media behemoths. The story of how he ended up navigating through the corporate bulwarks to eventually successfully publish his latest release, Lyrics 2 (iTunes Link), with the blessings of all three companies, no less, makes quite the App Store saga.

The initial version of Lyrics was simple. Kluivers collaborated with Moop.me, a programming cooperative, to build his application. Published this past May, Lyrics was the first application on the App Store to allow users to find and display song lyrics. Several other similar applications followed in the weeks after.

Kluivers built the application around the LyricsWiki database. Featuring over 700,000 songs, the wiki provided easy access to a much-desired resource. It was exactly that access to a vast library of songs that caused the first of Kluiver's corporate challenges. Apple insisted on censoring his lyrics.

Read on to learn more about what happened...

Digital music purchases have been dominating the market for some time now as physical CD purchases continue to fall. For Apple, a significant lead over the rest of the music proprietor world is not enough: according to the Financial Times, the company is now working together with the four largest record labels in the business to add new features to accompany digital music purchases through its iTunes Store in hopes of stimulating full album purchases.

[The FT also reports, without hedging, that Apple's "media pad" tablet device will ship in time for the holiday shopping season. According to the paper, the long-rumored iPad is intended as a full-featured portable computer and video & music player, like an oversized iPod touch, including wireless data connectivity but no built-in phone functions.]

Apple has formed an alliance with EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music to bundle whole albums with perks like interactive booklets, digital sleeve notes, and video clips. By doing so, Apple hopes to increase sales of the albums over single track purchases, a sales model that has been immensely popular in the advent of digital music.

The project, codenamed "Cocktail," is intended to recreate the former experience of album-purchasing, where you could browse the liner notes, follow lyrics, and look at the album artwork as the music played. Executives have said that users will even be able to play music straight from the proposed interactive booklets without having to use iTunes. Of course, the main motivation for increasing album sales is to increase profits, as albums have a higher margin than individual songs.

This change is one that should have taken place a long time ago- having to search for lyrics on shady, ad-ridden websites should already be a fading, shudder-inducing memory (though liner notes have been available on some albums, a change across the board has yet to take place). As items like liner notes and photos are possibly the last benefit that physical CDs can offer over digital purchases, this may turn out to be a very serious blow to the CD market. The iTunes Store album add-ons are set to roll out in September.

One neat little thing about the iPod and iPhone family of devices is their ability to display lyrics -- supported by all iPod nanos as well as the iPhone/iPod touch, and iPod Classic 5th generation and higher. On the iPhone and iPod touch, lyrics show up when a song is loaded (and can be re-displayed by tapping on the screen while a song is playing); while on the iPod nano, pressing the center button several times while a song is playing will cycle you through to display lyrics.

But the real issue isn't so much about displaying lyrics as much as it is obtaining them. PearLyrics was once my tried and true favorite way of getting lyrics, but it passed away some time ago.

I love singing along to my iPod. Not well, mind you, but loudly with lots of enthusiasm. I assure you my children love this exactly as much as you'd expect. So I was excited to test out Lyrics+ from SchroederDev. Lyrics+ helps find and display lyrics on your iPhone or iPod.

Although there are many Mac-based solutions that add lyrics to your iTunes library, Lyrics+ provides a simpler to use solution. You launch the app, choose "now playing song..." and *boom* the lyrics are right there for you. Or mostly there. Because there are significant breaks in their library of lyric coverage. For example, lyrics for the London Revival of Roger and Hammerstein's Oklahoma (yes, starring Wolverine) were completely MIA, as were those for the Drowsy Chaperone. Billy Joel's Ain't No Crime was also a no-show but Matt Wertz and Dixie Chicks lyrics were on offer.

Lyrics+ depends on several lyrics databases including LyricWiki.org. But for a $1.99 app (currently on sale for half price), were you expecting Gracenote Lyric Service? That kind of data base access could be offered affordably by major players like AT&T and Apple but for independent developers, Lyrics+ is about as good as you're going to get.

I found the app easy to use and fun, although I wish it would automatically update when the currently playing song changed. (I believe there are callback hooks and notifications in the Music Player frameworks that let you know when this occurs like MPMusicPlayerControllerNowPlayingItemDidChangeNotification.)

The interface is really basic. You can pick a song from your library, search by the currently playing song, and search by artist/song. Stability was just so-so. The application crashed several times during playback but it was easy enough to re-launch, and get back to the lyrics page and pick up with the currently playing song.

In the end, I really do like Lyrics+ despite its relatively limited feature set. Is it worth the two bucks (or one, during the current sale)? I'd say yes. With just a few taps, you can peek at the lyrics of the song that's currently playing and sing along to your heart's content and your children's dispepsia.

Name: Lyrics+ (iTunes link)
Developer: Bruce Schroeder
Platform: iPhone or iPod touch
Price: $1.99 (Sale: $0.99)

There's a dark family secret in my house, but it's one I must reveal: my wife is a karaoke fiend. Seriously, she's got a monkey on her back, and that chimp is singing "I Know Him So Well" from Chess. With this in mind, I've considered getting her Griffin's iKaraoke as a gift... but how to accomplish that ultra-cheesy singalong lyric scroll on screen? If only there were some way to add the lyrics to my iTunes tracks...

Trust those wacky engineers at Griffin to come up with something. The just-released, free TunePrompter for OS X 10.4 & Windows XP lets you load up your songs, search for lyrics online, and then sync the words to the music -- save out a video version and you're ready to rock and roll. Griffin's also running a giveaway of a bundle of products, and anyone who provides feedback on TunePrompter is eligible to win. One caveat: even though the iKaraoke is compatible with a range of iPods, the videos produced by TunePrompter will play on an iPod with Video (and on an iPhone, but chances are the microphone won't work). Download it here and start tracking your tunes... just don't tell my wife, OK?

If there's one music player feature that never seemed to catch on, it's showing off the lyrics of a given song. The record companies quibbled a little bit about cover art, but now even iTunes will provide you with cover art, and yet lyrics are still confined to ad-laden websites trying to hide from the copyright brigade. Music players gained a little ground earlier this year when Gracenote won the ability to distribute song lyrics, but so far only Yahoo Music has taken them up on the offer (and who uses Yahoo Music anyway, right?).

Apple is getting there, though. According to Ars Technica, they've applied for a patent to "dynamically" show text on the screen of a portable media device while the media is playing, specifically synchronized lyrics. They also mention two ways of doing this-- either scrolling the text across the screen (which seems like a strange setup, but might work), and the more standard method of distinguishing one part of the text from another-- in other, less legal words, the bouncing ball technique.

Either way, I've never seen a good implementation of showing lyrics in a music player (the last time I messed around with it was a plugin for Winamp however many years ago, and of course in that case you had to get them in there yourself). If anyone can tell you what the hell Björk is supposed to be saying on her latest album, hopefully it's Apple.

A deal between Apple iTunes and Gracenotes may be in the works according to this recent Reuters report posted by PC Magazine. Gracenotes has gained the rights to legally distribute lyrics from BMG, Universal Music, Sony/ATV and other content providers. A deal between iTunes and Gracenote is a natural evolution of this acquisition, similar to the existing agreement that allows Gracenote to supply iTunes with track information. Gracenotes CEO Craig Palmer expects lyrics to provide up to $100 million in annual revenues by a decade from now. An iTunes deal would create a portion of those revenues.

TUAW recently showed readers how to add lyrics to iPods using iTunes' current features.

Did you know you could view lyrics on your iPod? You can turn your iPod into a crude kind of sort-of-but-not-quite karaoke system by adding lyrics to your music and syncing those lyrics to your iPod. Both 5G and nano iPods allow you to view song lyrics as your music plays. Here are the steps to take to make this happen.

That beta version of Pod2go we mentioned last year (ok, a month ago) has gone official. The new version boasts a wealth of upgrades to the way it handles lyrics, Mail, iCal information, backup, news and apps, as well as support for multiple iPods. A number of usability enhancements are present as well, such as holding down the option key to change the "Sync" option in the menu bar icon to "Sync and Eject." Check out the lengthy list of release notes to catch up on the massive amount of changes in this unassuming point upgrade.

[via Hawk Wings]