How do I access lyrics in MusicKit… | Apple Developer Forums

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Hi There,

In the documentation of MusicKit's Song object I can find the hasLyrics property, with the following description:

A Boolean value that indicates whether the song has lyrics available in the catalog. If true, the song has lyrics available; otherwise, it doesn’t.

My only question now is, where can I find the lyrics if this returns true? What is "the catalog" in this case.

I hope the lyrics are available in MusicKit or the Apple Music API as this would save me a lot of headache connecting more API's (lyrics is one of my most requested feature)

983

Posted by

hiddevdploeg

Reply

Accepted Reply

Hello @hiddevdploeg,

Thanks for your question about accessing lyrics using MusicKit.

And thank you @robnotyou for this response. That's exactly right.

Feel free to file a ticket on Feedback Assistant explaining your use-case for lyrics in your app. This information could be useful for us to see if we might be allowed to expose lyrics in the future.

Best regards,

Posted by

JoeKun

Hello @JoeKun,

Thank you for answering this. I wanted to access to lyrics too and I filed a ticket for feedback.

And I see there is a Share Lyrics option in Apple Music and we can long-press to select specifit lines of lyrics to share BUT it can only be shared to Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat stories at this time. I wanted my app to know which lines of lyrics users like to share and do something cool with it. So I hope Share Lyrics can be able to open to other apps in the future.

Best wishes,

—
Xikai98

Replies

Lyrics are not available, via MusicKit.

While it might be possible to search on lyrics, you can not just download them (presumably due to copyright issues).

The "catalog" is just the term Apple use to refer to the music that it makes available.

Posted by

robnotyou

Hello @hiddevdploeg,

Thanks for your question about accessing lyrics using MusicKit.

And thank you @robnotyou for this response. That's exactly right.

Feel free to file a ticket on Feedback Assistant explaining your use-case for lyrics in your app. This information could be useful for us to see if we might be allowed to expose lyrics in the future.

Best regards,

Posted by

JoeKun

Hello @JoeKun,

Thank you for answering this. I wanted to access to lyrics too and I filed a ticket for feedback.

And I see there is a Share Lyrics option in Apple Music and we can long-press to select specifit lines of lyrics to share BUT it can only be shared to Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat stories at this time. I wanted my app to know which lines of lyrics users like to share and do something cool with it. So I hope Share Lyrics can be able to open to other apps in the future.

Best wishes,

—
Xikai98

Aah I was afraid this would be the case, will submit feedback! Thanks for responding :)

Posted by

hiddevdploeg

Hello @JoeKun, I also have use-case for lyrics. It's been three weeks since this discussion. so I wonder that Musickit/shazam decided to expose the API in the future?

Best regards,

Posted by

Dieber

Hello @Dieber,

We do not communicate status of any feature request other than to say that we are either investigating the feasibility, or that we have released an update including said feature.

In this particular case, all I can say is that we have heard the request.

If you are interested in this, it would be helpful for you to file a ticket on Feedback Assistant explaining your use-case for lyrics. Even if others have filed similar tickets, your use-case may be a bit different, and we want to hear about it. And, internally, we use the number of duplicate requests as a signal that helps us prioritize the various things we may want to improve on.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

Best regards,

Posted by

JoeKun