Genius Lyrics Scraper

Pull full song lyrics, rich metadata, songwriting credits, and artist profiles from Genius at scale — every track comes with plain-text lyrics, page-view and annotation counts, album art, and a streaming link on 99% of songs: YouTube on 98%, plus Apple Music, SoundCloud and Spotify links wherever Genius carries them. Built for ML and NLP researchers, music data analysts, journalists, and app developers who need a clean, structured lyrics dataset without parsing Genius song pages one at a time.

Why This Scraper?

• Full plain-text lyrics on every song row — the complete lyrics for each track, cleaned and line-broken, parsed straight from the song page (instrumentals and incomplete entries return null instead of garbage).
• Complete songwriting credits — separate writer, producer, and featured-artist name arrays per track, so you can build credit graphs and royalty-style attribution datasets.
• YouTube links on 98% of tracks and at least one streaming link on 99% — with Apple Music, SoundCloud and Spotify URLs added wherever Genius carries them, ready to join against your own catalog.
• Engagement signals built in — page-view counts and annotation counts per song let you rank tracks by popularity without a second data source.
• Three ways to feed it, mixed freely — keyword search, artist-page URLs for a full discography, and direct song URLs all in one run.
• Up to 1,000 songs per source — pull an artist's deep catalog (sorted by popularity) or a wide keyword sweep in a single invocation, with smooth pagination and no duplicate rows within a source.
• Standalone artist profiles — opt in to get follower count, Genius IQ, verification status, alternate names, biography, and Instagram / Twitter / Facebook handles as their own row.
• Filter to one of 12 languages — keep English-only, Spanish-only, or any single language, or leave it on "Any language" to capture multilingual catalogs whole.

Use Cases

NLP & ML Lyric Datasets

• Assemble a labeled corpus of plain-text lyrics for language-model fine-tuning
• Build sentiment, topic, or genre classifiers on real song text
• Train lyric-generation models on a single artist's complete catalog

Music Market Research

• Rank an artist's catalog by page views to find their breakout tracks
• Compare annotation counts to gauge which songs drive the most listener discussion
• Track release dates and explicit flags across a label's roster

Journalism & Editorial

• Pull verified songwriting and production credits for music reporting
• Quote lyrics with the canonical Genius source URL attached
• Build "who-produced-what" features from producer credit arrays

App & Playlist Development

• Power lyric-display features with clean, line-broken text
• Cross-link Genius tracks to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and SoundCloud IDs
• Surface album art and song thumbnails in your own UI

Academic & Cultural Research

• Study lyrical themes across decades using release-date metadata
• Analyze featured-artist collaboration networks at scale
• Map an artist's social-media reach via profile follower counts

Getting Started

Single Keyword Search

The simplest run — one search, the top 50 matching songs with lyrics:

{
    "searchQueries": ["HUMBLE Kendrick Lamar"],
    "maxResults": 50
}

Full Artist Discography

Paste an artist-page URL to pull their catalog, ranked by popularity, capped at 200 songs:

{
    "artistUrls": ["https://genius.com/artists/Drake"],
    "maxResults": 200,
    "includeArtistProfile": true
}

Multi-Source with Language Filter

Mix searches, artist pages, and direct song URLs — keep Spanish-language tracks only, and skip lyrics for a faster, lighter run:

{
    "searchQueries": ["bad bunny"],
    "artistUrls": ["https://genius.com/artists/Rosalia"],
    "songUrls": ["https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-humble-lyrics"],
    "language": "es",
    "includeLyrics": false,
    "includeArtistProfile": true,
    "maxResults": 100
}

Input Reference

Sources

Pick any combination — at least one is needed. Leave them all empty to run a small example search.

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	string[]	["HUMBLE Kendrick Lamar"]	Song titles, artist names, or lyric fragments to search on Genius. Each query runs independently and returns matching songs.
artistUrls	string[]	[]	Genius artist-page URLs (e.g. https://genius.com/artists/Drake) to pull a full discography, up to the limit below.
songUrls	string[]	[]	Direct Genius song-page URLs (e.g. https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-humble-lyrics). Each URL produces one song row.

Limits

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxResults	integer	50	Maximum songs per search query or per artist. Set to 0 for all available songs. Hard upper bound is 1,000 per source.

What to Extract

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
includeLyrics	boolean	true	Extract full plain-text lyrics for every song. Turn off for a faster, smaller run that returns metadata, credits, and links only (roughly twice as fast).
includeArtistProfile	boolean	false	When you provide an artist URL or search for an artist, also emit a standalone artist-profile row with followers, verified status, biography, and social handles.

Localization

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
language	select	Any language	Keep songs only in a specific language. Options: Any language, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified). Picking a specific language drops songs detected in other languages.

Output

Every row carries a recordType field — song or artist — so you can filter the two cleanly in one dataset.

Song (recordType: "song")

{
    "recordType": "song",
    "id": 3039923,
    "title": "HUMBLE.",
    "url": "https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-humble-lyrics",
    "language": "en",
    "explicit": true,
    "releaseDate": "2017-03-30",
    "pageviews": 4821334,
    "annotationCount": 87,
    "thumbnailUrl": "https://images.genius.com/thumb.300x300.jpg",
    "imageUrl": "https://images.genius.com/songart.1000x1000.jpg",
    "lyrics": "[Intro]\nNobody pray for me\nIt's been that day for me\n...",
    "description": "\"HUMBLE.\" was the lead single from Kendrick Lamar's fourth studio album...",
    "artistName": "Kendrick Lamar",
    "artistId": 1421,
    "artistUrl": "https://genius.com/artists/Kendrick-lamar",
    "artistImageUrl": "https://images.genius.com/artist.jpg",
    "albumName": "DAMN.",
    "albumUrl": "https://genius.com/albums/Kendrick-lamar/Damn",
    "albumCoverUrl": "https://images.genius.com/albumcover.jpg",
    "writerNames": ["Kendrick Lamar", "Mike WiLL Made-It"],
    "producerNames": ["Mike WiLL Made-It"],
    "featuredArtistNames": [],
    "spotifyUrl": "https://open.spotify.com/track/7KXjTSCq5nL1LoYtL7XAwS",
    "youtubeUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvTRZJ-4EyI",
    "soundcloudUrl": "https://soundcloud.com/kendrick-lamar-music/humble",
    "appleMusicUrl": "https://music.apple.com/us/song/1440882165",
    "recordingLocation": "Carnival Music Studio"
}

Core Fields

Field	Type	Description
recordType	string	Always "song"
id	number	Genius song ID
title	string	Song title
url	string	Canonical Genius song-page URL
language	string	Detected ISO language code
explicit	boolean	Explicit-content flag
releaseDate	string	Release date (YYYY, YYYY-MM, or YYYY-MM-DD)
lyrics	string	Full plain-text lyrics (null for instrumentals or incomplete entries)
description	string	Song description / context text
recordingLocation	string	Recording studio or location, when listed

Stats & Artwork

Field	Type	Description
pageviews	number	Total Genius page views for the song
annotationCount	number	Number of community annotations on the lyrics
thumbnailUrl	string	Small song-art image URL
imageUrl	string	Full-size song-art image URL

Artist & Album

Field	Type	Description
artistName	string	Primary artist name
artistId	number	Genius artist ID
artistUrl	string	Genius artist-page URL
artistImageUrl	string	Primary artist image URL
albumName	string	Album name, when the song belongs to one
albumUrl	string	Genius album-page URL
albumCoverUrl	string	Album cover-art image URL

Credits & Streaming Links

Field	Type	Description
writerNames	string[]	Songwriter credits
producerNames	string[]	Producer credits
featuredArtistNames	string[]	Featured-artist credits
spotifyUrl	string	Spotify track URL, when available
youtubeUrl	string	YouTube video URL, when available
soundcloudUrl	string	SoundCloud track URL, when available
appleMusicUrl	string	Apple Music URL, when available

Artist (recordType: "artist")

Emitted only when includeArtistProfile: true for artist sources.

{
    "recordType": "artist",
    "artistId": 1421,
    "name": "Kendrick Lamar",
    "url": "https://genius.com/artists/Kendrick-lamar",
    "imageUrl": "https://images.genius.com/artist.1000x1000.jpg",
    "alternateNames": ["K.Dot", "Kung Fu Kenny"],
    "followerCount": 41822,
    "isVerified": true,
    "iq": 21450,
    "description": "Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is a Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper from Compton, California...",
    "instagramName": "kendricklamar",
    "twitterName": "kendricklamar",
    "facebookName": "kendricklamar"
}

Field	Type	Description
recordType	string	Always "artist"
artistId	number	Genius artist ID
name	string	Artist display name
url	string	Genius artist-page URL
imageUrl	string	Artist avatar image URL
alternateNames	string[]	Known aliases and alternate spellings
followerCount	number	Genius follower count
isVerified	boolean	Whether the artist account is verified on Genius
iq	number	Genius IQ score (community contribution metric)
description	string	Artist biography text
instagramName	string	Instagram handle
twitterName	string	Twitter / X handle
facebookName	string	Facebook handle

Tips for Best Results

• Use artist URLs for complete discographies. A https://genius.com/artists/... URL pulls the artist's whole catalog sorted by popularity — far more reliable than guessing search terms for every track.
• Leave language on "Any language" for multilingual artists. Picking a specific language drops every track detected in another tongue, so bilingual or crossover catalogs come back partial. Only set a language when you truly want one.
• Turn off lyrics for metadata-only runs. Setting includeLyrics: false roughly halves runtime and shrinks each row when you only need credits, stats, and streaming links.
• Keep maxResults modest while testing. Start at 25–50 to confirm the data shape, then raise it — popular artists can have well over 1,000 songs, so an uncapped run is large.
• Add includeArtistProfile for one-row artist context. It appears once per artist source as its own artist row, so it costs a single extra result while giving you followers, IQ, and social handles.
• Filter by recordType downstream. Songs and artist profiles land in the same dataset — split on recordType to route each into its own table.
• Rank by pageviews for popularity, annotationCount for discussion. They capture different signals: views measure reach, annotations measure how much listeners dissect the lyrics.

Pricing

From $2.50 per 1,000 results — pay per result, with lyrics, credits, streaming links, and engagement stats all bundled into every song row at no extra charge. Your rate follows your Apify loyalty tier, so the more you run, the less each result costs.

Results	No discount	Bronze	Silver	Gold
100	$0.30	$0.28	$0.27	$0.25
1,000	$3.00	$2.80	$2.65	$2.50
10,000	$30.00	$28.00	$26.50	$25.00
100,000	$300.00	$280.00	$265.00	$250.00

These tiered rates take effect on 19 September 2026. A "result" is any row in the output dataset — a song or an artist profile. No compute charges — you only pay per result returned.

Integrations

Export data in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS. Connect to 1,500+ apps via:

• Zapier / Make / n8n — Workflow automation
• Google Sheets — Direct spreadsheet export
• Slack / Email — Notifications on new results
• Webhooks — Trigger custom APIs on run completion
• Apify API — Full programmatic access

Legal & Ethical Use

This actor is designed for legitimate research, journalism, and data analysis. Lyrics and other content remain the property of their respective rights holders — users are responsible for complying with applicable copyright law and Genius's terms of service, including respecting content-usage and redistribution rules. Do not use extracted data for spam, harassment, or any illegal purpose.