Apple Music in iOS 12 adds song search by lyrics, new artist pages

With this fall's release of iOS 12, one Apple Music upgrade will include the ability to search for songs by their lyrics, rather than just artist, album, or title.

Where a song contains the right lyrics, that fact will be highlighted in search results, AppleInsider found in testing the iOS 12 developer beta. The app still appears to prefer song titles when filtering search results.

The tweak should nevertheless make Apple Music friendlier to use, since people often mistake lyrics for titles, or may only be able to remember one line when trying to locate something.

Lyrics were added to Apple Music with 2016's iOS 10, but only for display while listening to tracks. The feature requires an internet connection, since it might be problematic to fetch lyrics for every song stored on a person's iPhone or iPad.

Also new in the iOS 12 beta is bigger artwork for artist pages, and a "Play" button on them. The latter will play every track in an artist's discography.

Artist pages in iOS 11...

...and artist pages in iOS 12.

iOS 12 will make a number of improvements, for instance ramping up performance, and introducing preliminary support for ported iOS apps. Other unannounced features have been discovered in the beta, such as the option to add a second face to Face ID.

19 Comments

CheeseFreeze 7 Years · 1339 comments

About 6 years ago

It's hard to find a way to transfer Spotify playlists to Apple Music. The solutions I found hardly work. Any suggestions? Thanks :)

ps: Limp Bizkit sucks.

patchythepirate 12 Years · 1254 comments

How it taking so long for Apple to create a karaoke app for the Apple TV??? They should've done this even before Apple Music was a thing. This would be a slam dunk success that no competitor would be able to match.

But of course Apple's services division never seems to do the obvious things it should be doing to be way more successful than it is, rather than just being perpetually propped up by app sales.

DAalseth 6 Years · 3067 comments

This will be great. Now I can find songs without knowing the title. Like that one by the Eurythmics that goes “Sweet beans are made of teas...” Or that song by Queen that has the line “Dynamite and its laced with beans...” Not to mention the classic by Hendrix “‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy...” I mean I know the lyrics perfectly, just not the titles. /lol

EDIT: Yes my younger relatives love it when I sing in the car.

ihatescreennames 19 Years · 1977 comments

AppleInsider said:
Lyrics were added to Apple Music with 2016's iOS 10, but only for display while listening to tracks. The feature requires an internet connection, since it might be problematic to fetch lyrics for every song stored on a person's iPhone or iPad.

Why would that be problematic? For years I used to use PearLyrics, it would fetch the lyrics of the song currently playing in iTunes and add them to the Lyrics tab under Song Info in iTunes. After that I could view the lyrics on the screen of my 3rd gen iPod. I don't see why downloading the lyrics would be an issue today.