Are You Looking for Song Lyrics or Looking for Trouble?

You love the song, but can't for the life of you figure out all the words? It's so embarrassing to be singing about "car wheels" only to find out the artist was singing about "cartwheels," isn't it? What you don't want to do is head over the one of the many lyrics sites on the web. For reasons not hard to fathom, lyrics sites are notorious for spreading all sorts of bad things to your computer. The sites are ripe grounds for spreading spyware and adware and a likely place to have your email name mined for other purposes.

Why target seemingly innocuous lyrics sites? It may be as simple as a popularity contest. Lyrics sites get nearly 23 million searches performed each month.

Last week I wrote about the research that McAfee did on kids' screensavers. I looked at the insidious practice of creating screensaver downloads that carry all sorts of PC intrusions.

McAfee performed a series of tests to see how safe lyrics sites were. It used this year's televised MTV Video Music awards and searched for lyrics from the songs of the nominated artists coupled with the word "lyrics." Next, it used its SiteAdvisor technology to test the site for safety and then color-coded the dangerousness of the sites: red for high, yellow for medium, and green for safe.

The envelope please…

The worst offenders for songs whose lyrics searches led to risky web sites were:

In first place, Yung Joc and Nitty's song "It's Goin Down"—70 percent of search results on this song were rated red or yellow. Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man" came in second with 60 percent risky results; Common's "Testify" and Three 6 Mafia's "Stay Fly" won for Most Dangerous Hip-Hop Video. On average, 36 percent of lyrics search results for the nominated songs were links to risky sites.

The safest song? Green Day's "Wake Me When September Ends" returned the safest lyrics sites with only 10 percent risky results. To see the full results visit McAfee.

By the way, lyrics sites have come under scrutiny for other reasons, too. Sites like lyricsworld, anysonglyrics, lyricsandsong, lyricsmine, and the others are all part of an ongoing and heated debate as to whether downloading song lyrics (chords and tabs to music, too, for that matter) is in violation of copyright law. A year ago, the music industry, spearheaded by the Music Publishers Association came down on the lyrics and tablature sites for violating copyright, saying that taking lyrics and tablature from free web sites robs musicians of the ability to make money from their works. Others argue that these sites actually promote the artist by popularizing their work and create works the artists would not create. In past year, the MPA has retreated from pursuing legal action, but still points to these sites as being serious violations.

I'd love to hear how you feel about the legality behind lyrics and tablature web sites. But legal or illegal, based on the trouble you and your PC could get into by visiting, it may be best to ask a friend to teach you the words.