Yahoo!'s announcement last week that it's posting the lyrics to 400,000 songs on Yahoo! Music should be considered good news by musicians, would-be musicians and those who simply want to sing in their showers.

		David Radin is a business consultant and freelance writer, who used to think he knew the words to all his favorite songs. You can contact him at www.megabyteminute.com.

Certainly my kids will love having the option to finally look up lyrics online without their dad coming down hard on them for going to Web sites they don't know. From my experience, free lyrics Web sites are often laden with spyware. Not only have I asked my children to stay away, but I've also shied away from them myself, just in case.

But we don't have to worry about spyware from Yahoo! (or at least I hope not). So it's safe to look up lyrics. I looked up a few on the day of the Yahoo! launch. It was easy, and there were lots of options besides reading the lyrics. From a lyrics page, you're only a click away from a sample of the song, a bio of the artist, a download that you can purchase, reviews, and even links to fan sites for that artist. That's pretty much everything you need to get engulfed in the sound and story.

Yet I just had to stretch my test beyond the normal limits. So I looked up lyrics that already had caused me to question my hearing -- those that had at some time made me say, "Did he say that?" or "What did he say?"

I started my Yahoo! lyrics search with the Temptations' "My Girl," a lovely melody that makes it easy to sing along. Problem is that when you sing along, you don't always hear what the singer is singing. So a few years ago, on one of those rare occasions on which I wasn't singing along, I noticed the lyric was different than I had always known it. Instead of lead singer David Ruffin saying "I've got so much honey the bees sent to me," he was saying "the bees envy me."

So I just had to make sure that Yahoo! got it right the first time. Yahoo! passed my first test to a point. Although the printed "My Girl" lyrics had the right words, it also included ramblings -- "all right," "all right, now" and "yeah." They didn't sound familiar. So I played the Motown classic that I remembered and didn't hear these stray words and phrases -- not even in Mr. Ruffin's signature ramblings.

Then I went on to look at David Bowie, Mott the Hoople and Crosby Still & Nash, looking at the same type of issues. It became obvious that the lyrics, which are furnished by Gracenote, are actually from specific recordings and might not be exactly the same as you see on the published sheet music. I verified this observation by pulling up the sheet music to see how Smokey Robinson wrote "My Girl."

In the big picture, the differences are really more annoyances than problems. But if a singer changes words for a recording, it could have an impact. For instance, according to kissthisguy.com, Jimi Hendrix wrote "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" in his song "Purple Haze," but often goofed with live audiences, saying "kiss this guy" instead -- which contributed to the phrase being among the most often cited misquoted lyric.

I guess it's just one more reason that we have to check and check again when we use the Internet, because some information is better than others.