Picture this: you hear a song you like and immediately want to add it to your Apple Music library. Of course, at this point, you should whip out Shazam to identify it and add it to your library.

However, If you haven’t used Shazam in a while, your first instinct would be to Google the song's lyrics. But that’s an extra, unnecessary step. You can type the song lyrics in Apple Music’s search function instead, and this article will show you how.

How Apple Music’s Search Feature Works

Photo of a man wearing sunglasses listening to music through headphones while looking at a phone

Apple Music's search feature allows you to search for a song using its lyrics. It comes in handy when you don't know the title of a song and can only remember part of the lyrics.

Apple Music's library consists of more than 90 million songs, so if you use the feature correctly, you'll probably find the song you're looking for in no time. Please note that you can only use this feature if you're subscribed to Apple Music.

The service doesn't have a free tier. However, there are several ways you can get Apple Music for free. If you want to continue using Apple Music after your free trial period is up, you can consider which Apple Music plan is best for you.

How to Search for a Song on Apple Music Using Lyrics

It's easy to search for a song on Apple Music using lyrics. In fact, the process is similar to that of finding a song using its title. Follow the steps below to get started:

  1. Launch Apple Music on your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook.
  2. Navigate to the search tab, type a portion of the lyrics, and then hit enter.
  3. Apple Music will return results for songs matching the words you've entered. Find the one you're looking for and start streaming.

What You Need to Know When Searching for Songs on Apple Music

While using song lyrics to find a song is one of the best Apple Music features you probably didn't know about, we have a few notes for you to remember. Try to enter as many words as possible to return a more accurate list of results. We're not telling you to type paragraphs of a song's lyrics, but a handful of words will do—we'd say more than five.

This is especially important when searching for a song with common words, like "love" or "baby." For example, we ran a search for Luther Vandross' song titled Superstar/Until You Come Back To Me. In the first search, we used the first five words of the song.

The search was inaccurate, especially given how generic the words searched are ("I wanna tell you, baby"). As you can see in the screenshot below, the song isn't even featured in the top results.

screenshot of luther vandross song lyric search on apple music desktop app

We then followed by typing in more lyrics in the search bar. This time, we searched the first 11 words of the song: "I wanna tell you, baby, the changes I've been going through." As you can see in the screenshot below, the song we were looking for was the first result on the list.

screenshot of apple music search for luther vandross song using lyrics on desktop app app

Based on this, we'd advise adding more words to your search if the first few words of the song you're looking for are generic or common. This will narrow down your search and bring up more accurate results.

Find Songs Quickly on Apple Music

Searching for a song using lyrics is a common thing to do. However, it's popular to use Google and then switch to Apple Music once you've found the song title, which is a lot of extra work.

Now that you know you can use the same method on Apple Music, why not try it? This will allow you to search for and stream songs in one place and quickly add them to your Apple Music playlists.