Issues with song lyrics' websites

[LonelyBoy]

I'm sure most here have visited them after hearing a song.

Yet even the top-rated and most popular sites seem (to me) to include glaring mistakes and errors.

I don't know whether bands or so-called recording artists release OFFICIAL lyrics anywhere, but it doesn't look like it.

I think that even a person whose mother tongue is English would need to listen extra carefully and keep skipping back to listen again and again.

Language also includes lots of nuances and subtleties, word-play, puns, metaphors, current 'in' jokes and cultural references, the latter may be very short-lived.

It seems that many of these sites are run and the songs transcribed by amateurs or non-Anglophones.

This is even more common on YouTube videos that include lyrics.

[Merritt]

I assume they don't check whether the lyrics are right, unless maybe when it's a song they're getting millions of hits for. One site pulls it's data from one source, then another from that, and so on.

It's irritating though, when you look up a song and think, 'They clearly aren't singing that', yet every lyrics site insists they are. Perhaps worse is when the official lyrics, right there in the liner notes, don't match the actual song. Never quite understood what that's about.

Ooh, it makes me mildly peeved, it does.

[LonelyBoy]

We are peeved together.

[Merritt]

Two peeved in a pod.

[Drew Peacock]

You usually find the lyrics printed on the CD inlay.

[Mr. Spaceman]

I listen to a lot of foreign language music nowadays and I haven't got a clue what they're going on about most of the time.