iOS 12 Lets You Search by Lyrics in Apple Music

iOS 10 brought song lyrics to the Music app and now iOS 12 is introducing the ability to include song lyrics in search results. So if you can only remember the catchy chorus of that one song you can search for the lyrics in the iOS 12 Music app and find what you’re looking for without needing to head to the web first.
The search by lyrics feature is still in development as part of the overall iOS 12 beta, but Apple Music subscribers who are developers or members of the public beta program can test it out right now. To do so, just grab your iPhone or iPad that has been updated to iOS 12 and open the Music app.
Tap the Search icon at the bottom of the screen, type the lyrics of a song into the search field, and tap Search on the virtual keyboard. You’ll see a list of results based on media type and you’ll notice that there’s a new “Lyrics” entry for certain search results.

In our screenshot example, we typed “it was always burning since the world…” and correctly received Billy Joel’s 1989 track We Didn’t Start the Fire as a result.
There are a few caveats, however. First, not every song in the Apple Music library has its lyrics properly associated with it, and so these songs will obviously not show up in search results. Second, in playing around with the feature, you’ll need to be fairly accurate in your spelling of the lyrics. If you misheard the lyrics and type something similar (i.e., “hold me closer, Tony Danza“), you likely won’t receive the result you’re looking for. We found that a Google search in such situations almost always yielded better results.
Finally, note that this is still beta software, so the lyrics search feature isn’t working reliably at all times.