🎵 Genius Lyrics Scraper

🚀 Export song metadata and lyrics from Genius in seconds. Search any artist, song title, or keyword and get structured data including lyrics, annotations, page views, and release dates - ready to download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 12 fields per record · Scales to 1,000,000 items · Global coverage

The Genius Lyrics Scraper lets you extract structured song data from Genius.com, the world's largest song lyrics and music knowledge database. Every record contains the song title, artist, URL, release date, annotation count, page views, featured artists, and optionally the full lyrics text - all pulled from Genius's live data in real time.

The dataset covers all artists and genres available on Genius - from hip-hop and pop to rock, country, and classical. Whether you need a handful of records for a quick project or millions of entries for large-scale NLP training, the scraper handles it.

Target Audience / Use Cases

Who	What They Need
Music researchers	Metadata and lyrics for corpus analysis
NLP / ML engineers	Lyric text for language model training data
Data journalists	Artist popularity signals (pageviews, annotations)
Playlist curators	Release dates and featured artist mapping
Music educators	Annotated lyrics and song breakdowns
Fans and bloggers	Complete song metadata for any artist

📋 What the Genius Lyrics Scraper does

• Search Genius by artist name, song title, or any keyword
• Returns song title, artist, Genius URL, release date, annotation count, and page view stats
• Optionally fetches full lyrics for each song (one extra request per song)
• Extracts featured artist lists
• Paginates automatically to collect as many results as needed
• Limits free users to 10 items; paid users can extract up to 1,000,000

💡 Why it matters: Genius has over 5 million annotated songs - the richest publicly available source of lyrics, artist metadata, and crowd-sourced music knowledge on the internet.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	Drake	Artist name, song title, or keywords
includeLyrics	boolean	false	Fetch full lyrics for each song (slower)
maxItems	integer	10	Max records to return (free: 10, paid: up to 1,000,000)

Example - metadata only (fast):

{
    "searchQuery": "Taylor Swift",
    "includeLyrics": false,
    "maxItems": 50
}

Example - with lyrics:

{
    "searchQuery": "Eminem Lose Yourself",
    "includeLyrics": true,
    "maxItems": 10
}

⚠️ Good to Know: When includeLyrics is enabled, the scraper makes one additional HTTP request per song to fetch the lyrics page. For large datasets, this significantly increases runtime. For metadata-only use cases, leave includeLyrics set to false.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
🖼️ imageUrl	string	Song header image URL
🎵 title	string	Song title
🎤 artist	string	Primary artist name
🔗 url	string	Genius song page URL
💿 albumName	string or null	Album name (not available in search results)
📅 releaseDate	string	Release date as shown on Genius
📝 annotationCount	integer	Number of annotations on the song
👁️ pageviews	integer	Page view count
👥 featuredArtists	array	List of featured artist names
📖 lyrics	string or null	Full lyrics text (only when includeLyrics=true)
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of extraction
❌ error	string or null	Error message if extraction failed

Sample record:

{
    "imageUrl": "https://images.genius.com/3bfbcd7698edb8782c6634ce6dcaab17.1000x1000x1.png",
    "title": "God's Plan",
    "artist": "Drake",
    "url": "https://genius.com/Drake-gods-plan-lyrics",
    "albumName": null,
    "releaseDate": "January 19, 2018",
    "annotationCount": 20,
    "pageviews": 10041404,
    "featuredArtists": [],
    "lyrics": "[Intro]\nAnd they wishin' and wishin'\nAnd wishin' and wishin', they wishin' on me\nYeah\n\n[Verse 1]\nI been movin' calm, don't start no trouble with me...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T01:54:39.924Z",
    "error": null
}

Note: albumName is null in search results. Genius does not include album data in the multi-search API response. All other fields are consistently populated.

✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	Detail
🚀 No login required	Public data only, no Genius account needed
🎯 Internal API	Uses Genius's internal search API for reliable structured data
📖 Real lyrics	Extracts clean lyrics text with section headers ([Verse 1], [Chorus], etc.)
📊 Popularity signals	Page views and annotation counts for every song
⚡ Fast by default	Metadata-only mode skips lyrics fetching for maximum speed
🔁 Paginated	Automatically pages through results for large datasets
💼 Structured output	Clean JSON ready for CSV/Excel export

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Feature	This Actor	Manual copy-paste	Genius API (official)
Requires auth	No	No	Yes (API key)
Bulk export	Yes	No	Limited
Lyrics included	Optional	Manual	Yes
Structured data	Yes	No	Yes
Page views	Yes	No	Yes
Pagination	Automatic	Manual	Manual

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the Genius Lyrics Scraper actor page
3. Enter your search query (artist name, song title, or keywords)
4. Choose whether to include lyrics
5. Set maxItems (10 for free, up to 1,000,000 for paid)
6. Click Start and wait for the run to complete
7. Download your dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

💼 Business use cases

Music Research and Analytics

Track which songs dominate search results for any artist, monitor annotation growth as a proxy for fan engagement, and analyze page view data to understand song popularity over time.

NLP Training Data

Build lyric corpora for language model training, sentiment analysis, rhyme detection, or genre classification. The includeLyrics option gives you clean, structured text with section markers intact.

Artist and Catalog Management

Map complete discographies, identify featured artist relationships, and extract release dates to build timelines. Cross-reference pageviews for catalog prioritization.

Playlist and Recommendation Systems

Pull metadata for large song catalogs to power recommendation engines. Use artist, featured artists, and release date fields as training signals for collaborative filtering models.

🔌 Automating Genius Lyrics Scraper

Connect this actor to your workflows using Apify integrations:

• Make (Integromat) - trigger on schedule, push results to Google Sheets
• Zapier - send new lyrics data to Slack, Notion, or Airtable
• Apify API - call programmatically from any application
• Webhooks - receive dataset updates when a run completes

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Academic Research

Study linguistic patterns in popular music, analyze how lyrical complexity correlates with commercial success, or trace cultural references across decades of song lyrics.

Fan Projects

Build artist discography databases, create lyric search tools, or generate statistics about your favorite artists' catalog.

Non-profit and Education

Develop educational tools around song analysis, music history projects, or media literacy curricula using real-world lyric data.

Experimentation

Train text generation models on lyrics, experiment with rhyme detection algorithms, or build genre classifiers using Genius metadata as ground truth labels.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

You can ask an AI assistant questions like:

• "How do I scrape lyrics for all of Taylor Swift's songs?"
• "What fields does the Genius Lyrics Scraper return?"
• "How do I export the data to a spreadsheet?"

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔑 Do I need a Genius account or API key? No. The scraper uses Genius's public search API and public song pages. No account or API key is required.

📖 How accurate are the lyrics? Lyrics are sourced directly from Genius song pages, the same content you see when visiting genius.com in your browser. Genius lyrics are crowd-sourced and reviewed by the community.

💿 Why is albumName always null? Genius's multi-search API does not include album data in search results. The album field is available on individual song API endpoints, which would require a separate request per song. This may be added in a future version.

⚡ How fast is the scraper? Without lyrics: very fast - typically 5 songs per API call, dozens of calls per minute. With lyrics enabled, each song requires an additional page request, reducing throughput proportionally.

📊 How many results can I get? Free users: up to 10 items. Paid users: up to 1,000,000 items. Results per search query are limited by Genius's index size for that query.

🌍 Does it work for all languages? Yes. Genius indexes songs in all languages. Search in any language and lyrics will be returned in their original language.

🔄 Can I search multiple artists at once? Run the actor multiple times with different searchQuery values, or use Apify's API to trigger multiple runs in parallel.

📅 How fresh is the data? All data is scraped in real time from Genius on every run. No cached responses are used.

🛡️ Is this allowed? This scraper accesses only publicly available data that anyone can view without logging in on genius.com.

💳 What happens if I'm on the free plan? Free users receive up to 10 results per run as a preview. Upgrade to a paid plan to unlock up to 1,000,000 results.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Export your dataset and use it with: Google Sheets - Google Drive - Airtable - Notion - Slack - Microsoft Excel - PostgreSQL - MySQL - MongoDB - BigQuery - Snowflake - Zapier - Make - n8n - REST API - Python - JavaScript - R - any tool that reads JSON or CSV

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection to find scrapers for hundreds of websites - all built to the same quality standard.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: This actor is an independent tool, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Genius. It accesses only publicly available data. Use responsibly and in accordance with Genius's terms of service.