Use songs for vocabulary and for the repetition, and take nothing else from them. A melody is one of the strongest memory hooks available, and it is simultaneously the least reliable witness in this whole subject about how English is actually spoken.
The reason is that everything a song does to a line, it does for the tune. Vowels get stretched and opened because they have to be sung. The beat lands where the bar wants it. And a word gets dropped or a form bent because the syllables did not fit, which is a musical decision that a learner has no way to see happening.
Eight facts about what songs do and do not teach
- songs are for vocabulary, not for pronunciation. What they teach best is phrases; what they teach worst is how English actually sounds.
- stress moves to fit the tune, so a word sung is often stressed on the wrong syllable, and copying that is a real risk.
- songs stretch vowels and hide rhythm, removing exactly the stress timing that makes English recognisable.
- the lyrics carry idiom well, and a chorus is a memorable container for an expression.
- a chorus repeats and sticks, which is the single strongest argument for using music at all.
- choose slow songs first, and folk or acoustic material over anything heavily produced.
- read the lyrics after listening, in that order, or it becomes a reading exercise with a soundtrack.
- sing along to fix phrases. Producing the words at tempo does more than listening to them again.
What a song is genuinely good for
Two things, and both are unmatched. The first is that you will hear the same line hundreds of times without deciding to, which no other material on earth offers: nobody rewatches a scene four hundred times, and people play a song they like exactly that often. Words attached to a tune arrive years later intact.
The second is that a chorus is a fixed phrase learned whole, which is the format speech actually runs on. A line you can sing is retrieved at the cost of one item rather than assembled from parts, and if the line happens to be something a person might say, you have acquired it in the most useful possible form.
Where it stops: taking the grammar
The stall is treating a lyric as evidence about English. A learner who has sung she don't love me several hundred times has installed it, and it will come out in a job interview years later with no memory attached of where it came from.
Songs license forms that ordinary speech does not, partly for the metre and partly because a great deal of popular music is written in varieties that are perfectly systematic and are not the English being taught. Ain't, dropped auxiliaries and double negatives are not errors in the songs; they belong to the register. They become errors when they arrive in an essay carried by somebody who did not know they were making a choice.
Nothing corrects this, because a song is not a person who can be asked. The line is repeated identically every time, it never varies, and repetition is exactly what the memory reads as confirmation.
The lyrics, and what people are arguing about underneath them
Genius is free, needs no account, and carries the words along with crowd-written annotations that explain the references, the idioms and the wordplay. That second layer is what a plain lyrics site never had, and for a genre built on allusion it is the difference between reading a page of words you can all define and understanding the line.
It replaced the lyric booklet folded into a CD case, which gave you the words and not one syllable of explanation. Two limitations, and both matter here. The annotations are written by anybody, so quality swings from a scholarly note to a guess. And the transcription is faithful to what was sung, which is a virtue for listening and a trap for grammar: it will print she don't because that is what she sang.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
The recognisable failure is a pronunciation copied from a singer. Sung vowels are longer, more open and more evenly weighted than spoken ones, so a learner who has learned a word from a chorus produces a stretched, flattened version of it that is understood and sounds odd in a way nobody can name.
The second is mishearing that never gets corrected. Native speakers mishear lyrics constantly and it is a running joke among them, which tells you how little the signal in a mixed track resembles the signal in speech. A learner who cannot make out a line has discovered something about the recording, not about their listening.
The reason the beats are in the wrong places is set out in why English stresses some words in a sentence and swallows the rest, and the forms that a lyric will hand you and an examiner will not accept belong with what people actually say, and when not to say it. Both sit under real speed, real accents, no subtitles.
What songs cannot give you at all is two people taking turns, which is the thing that actually breaks listening, so the useful next move is back to talk with the words written down somewhere you can check them: listening with no pictures to lean on.