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How do I access lyrics in MusicKit or Apple Music Catalog

Media Technologies General MusicKit Apple Music API

hiddevdploeg OP

Created Jan ’22

Replies 5

Boosts 2

Views 3.7k

Participants 5

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)

Answered by Frameworks Engineer in 700828022

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,

Boost

Jan ’22

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.

1

Frameworks Engineer OP

Apple

Jan ’22

Accepted Answer

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,

2

hiddevdploeg OP

Jan ’22

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

1

Feb ’22

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,

0

Frameworks Engineer OP

Apple

Feb ’22

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,

1

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