Any new band will go to almost any lengths to get their music heard and the Internet offers many straightforward ways to do this. Many new bands post information about themselves and their music at www.myspace.com where visitors can either stream or download music. The mini sites offered here are customizable and the quantity of space available very generous.

These sites thus allow personal connections to develop between bands and the fans that follow them. The up and coming band called ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’, for example, recently previewed their new album exclusively at www.myspace.com allowing their fans to hear the material before it hit stores. To date, this exclusive arrangement has lured tens of thousands of people to check out the band’s own site, offering them unprecedented publicity for free.

While this arrangement would seem advantageous to both musician and listener, some bands find the notion to be anathema, assuming that it will mean lost sales and ultimately, lost profits. Many more established bands have been slow to create their own music sharing sites, while others have fought to have file-sharing using peer-to-peer networks stopped altogether.

And yet the notion that online music sharing will exert a negative impact on CD sales seems to hold little water, as British band ‘Artic Monkeys’ recently displayed. The band made available on their website all their material and instead of losing out on CD sales, their debut album quickly became the fastest selling debut album of all time.

It seems that the ability to download MP3 benefits all concerned, both band and fan alike. So may the spirit of sharing long continue, so that everyone can continue to enjoy the fruits of the musicians’ labor.

With so many download services on the internet today, most companies still ignore the issue of lyrics as most uses would like to have the music with the lyrics. So how do you get your lyrics onto your mp3 player?

Just as there are many lyrics sites, there is today a huge variety of shareware developers who have created plugins for most of the devices on the market. Now you can import the lyrics into your IPod or MP3 player for most music bought on the internet. A good example is the iTunes tracker software that which connects online to retrieve your lyrics. The software not only allows you to organize the lyrics but also to save, edit and store them.

The software is very simple when reading lyrics. The progams are similiar to to the first version on Windows Player where it would read the file to extract the name of the song and the artist. What most of these software packages does is merely to connect to the internet after completing the same process and downloading the lyrics for the song that it had identified. The technology for find lyrics is not new.

Now that you have the song, what do you do with it. Most of the lyric software allows you to tag or mark the lyrics so that each time the music was played it would display the lyrics on your screen. The software varies and each is different. Some will not store the lyrics for you on a long term bases and you need to download the lyrics each time you listen tot he song. Others keep the lyrics for you on your player so each time you play it the lyrics would be displayed. Very few of these however allow you to print the lyrics when done. So they do limit the use of lyrics on your mp3 player. The shareware market is filled with lyrics readers, but most of them have very limited features as they require you to but the full version or proffessional edition of the software to make use of all the features.

Lyrics can be download or view online for most applications. Happy singing!