LyricWiki and MusicBrainz are two community-powered sites about music which share some of the same passionate users. LyricWiki contains song lyrics and MusicBrainz contains metadata (detailed info) about music.
As of today, the two projects are going to be able to work together better than ever. Now that LyricWiki has obtained licensing, MusicBrainz can now link to song lyrics without worrying about legal issues. LyricWiki has given explicit permission to MusicBrainz to do so and MusicBrainz has added LyricWiki links (as an AR type) to their standard.
Linking from LyricWiki to MusicBrainz
To link to an artist, track, or release on MusicBrainz, put “musicbrainz= [UUID]” into the footer (ArtistFooter, AlbumFooter, or SongFooter) template. For [UUID], put in the MusicBrainzIdentifier. This has been available for quite a while, but hopefully there will be many more links now that we’re working more closely.
Linking from MusicBrainz to LyricWiki
To link a release or a track to LyricWiki, copy the LyricWiki album or track URL and then navigate to the proper release or track page in MusicBrainz. Be sure to be logged in and then click on “Relate to URL” link. Follow the instructions on the next page to add the LyricWiki URL to MusicBrainz.
This is an exciting opportunity for the two projects to be more closely linked together. We’re looking forward to it!
– Sean Colombo & Robert Kaye
MetaBrainz Blog 
Genius. Did I imagine the Gracenote branding that appeared on LyricWiki?
I got to Portishead first ;p
http://musicbrainz.org/release/8f468f36-8c7e-4fc1-9166-50664d267127.html
This is great; especially once we have NGS and recordings/works.
How does the fact that GraceNote is their licensing provider affect things? i.e. what leverage do GraceNote have, if any? Can GraceNote pull licensing approval/massively increase charges leaving LyricWiki’s content to be illegitimate/unlicensed and thus legally dubious?
@voice: Well, GracetNote can do anything they want. But I suspect that they want the income from Wikia more than they want to yank Wikia’s chain. Should Wikia lose its lyrics license we’d need to pull our links.
But, I don’t suspect that we’ll have any real problems with this setup.
Will we be able to use their data somehow?
For example: put the lyrics they provide into files using Picard?
What happened to the link on all MB pages that would allow the data to link into Picard (that green tag button). It’s been gone for about a week? I’ve searched everywhere I can think on the site and can’t find any comment on it.
(Apologies for the offtopic comment)
Hi,
we’re licensing lyrics directly all over the world and use MB to be tagged with our Music Publisher Meta-Data , We’re in contact with MB in order to do this.
So no worries about Gracenote.
m.
mitya: You need to open a browser page from Picard to see the green tagger icons. Just click on Lookup for any given track!
Atedos: You can view them, but you can’t really do anything else with them. 😦
Please update this blog entry. The correct syntax for the AlbumFooter is:
{{AlbumFooter
|musicbrainz = <>
}}
The blog entry is missing the “|” before musicbrainz. Please see:
http://lyrics.wikia.com/Help:Contents/Editing/Formatting/Albums
Also, should one put the UUID for a particular release or if there is release-group the UUID to the release group?
I really don’t understand this. Can anyone explain step-by-step how to add the lyrics to my songs?
After I load MusicBrainz Picard, where do I go? Where do I place the “musicbrainz= [UUID]”? Where do I find the footer templates? I am completely lost.
That is to add links to the MusicBrainz site from the LyricsWiki site, http://lyrics.wikia.com/Lyrics_Wiki – it has nothing to do with Picard at all.