Get Song Lyrics with Python and the Genius API — lyricsgenius Example

A short Python script that searches the Genius API for a song with the lyricsgenius library and prints its title, artist, album, and a lyrics preview.

Overview

This script searches for a song by title and artist name using the Genius API, cleans the retrieved lyrics by stripping section headers (e.g., [Verse 1]), and prints the song’s metadata along with a preview of the lyrics (up to 1,000 characters).

Features

  • Searches the Genius database by song title and artist name
  • Removes section headers (e.g., [Chorus], [Bridge]) from lyrics using regex
  • Displays song title, artist, album, and a 1,000-character lyrics preview
  • Skips remixes and live recordings via excluded_terms
  • Suppresses non-song results using skip_non_songs

Requirements

lyricsgenius

Install the dependency:

pip install lyricsgenius

Configuration

Open Lyrics.py and update the following variables:

Variable Description
genius API token Replace the token string with your own Genius API token
song_title The title of the song to search for
artist_name The artist’s name

To get a Genius API token, register at genius.com/developers and create a new API client.

Usage

From the Console_Code folder:

python Lyrics.py

Output Format

🎵 Title: <song title>
🎤 Artist: <artist>
💿 Album: <album full title>

🎶 Lyrics:

<first 1,000 characters of the lyrics>...

If no match is found, the script prints Song not found.

File Structure

Lyrics/
└── Console_Code/
    └── Lyrics.py    # Main script

Notes

  • Use your own Genius API token. Do not commit a real token to source control — read it from an environment variable instead, for example lyricsgenius.Genius(os.environ["GENIUS_ACCESS_TOKEN"]).
  • song.album can be None for songs without an album on Genius, which would make the song.album.full_title line fail.
  • The Genius free API tier has rate limits. If you hit them, the search may return None.
  • Only the first 1,000 characters of the lyrics are printed in the current implementation.

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