Evangeline : the song lyrics database
Evangeline is a repository of song lyrics that includes the rights holder’s authorization to use them. Through agreements negotiated by the Professional Music Publishers’ Association (Association des professionnels de l’édition musicale – APEM), Evangeline allows for the legal and paid exploitation of song lyrics in Québec’s schools as well as online by services such as Google, Google Play Music, Deezer, Shazam, MetroLyrics and many more websites and applications.
Song lyrics are in high demand (up to 5 million Google searches per day) and are often not legally available, despite very often being available in print in legacy physical formats. Besides traditional websites, an increasing number of online music services use lyrics.
Evangeline promotes the discoverability of songs through their lyrics, which can be used as keywords, but also due to the fact that our application gathers and fixes various metadata. Evangeline’s lyrics are available on the public portal lyricsportal.com, also made possible by APEM, which uses the schema.org standard for semantic indexation by search engines. What’s more, Evangeline’s data is interoperable with other music industry databases thanks to standards such as IPI, SOCAN number, ISWC and ISRC.
Evangeline seeks to :
- Promote songs and their discoverability through enhanced metadata
- Allow for the legal and paid exploitation of lyrics
- Compile lyrics for archival purposes
Evangeline user guide (click to download)
Lyrics Portal : Evangeline’s public portal
Members of the public can consult Evangeline’s contents via LyricsPortal.com. This web portal also uses the schema.org standard for semantic indexation by search engines in order to promote the discoverability of musical works and their lyrics.
Moreover, LyricsPortal.com has a crowdsourcing tool that allow members of the public to contribute song lyrics through an interactive user interface. Those lyrics are then sent to the appropriate publisher so they can authorize their integration to Evangeline.