Lyric Video
A music video in which the song's lyrics are the visual itself — animated text timed to the vocals or the beat, typically built with kinetic typography.
What is a Lyric Video?
A lyric video is a music video where the song's words are the picture: animated text appears in time with the vocals or the beat, doing the work a filmed performance would otherwise do. The animation style behind most lyric videos is kinetic typography — type that moves, scales, and lands on the rhythm of the track.
Artists use lyric videos as the fast companion release for a single (often published the same day as the song), and as vertical cuts for Shorts, Reels, and TikTok. For independent musicians they solve a real problem: a full music video costs thousands, while a lyric video needs only the track and its words.
What makes one work
Readability at the song's speed is the whole game: every word must be legible in the moment it is sung. Strong lyric videos keep one or two typefaces, two or three colors from the track's mood, and spend emphasis — scale pops, color shifts — only on hook words.
Make a lyric video from a brief
Paste your lyrics, upload your track — iArt syncs kinetic typography to the vocals or the beat and renders a 1080p video in minutes.
Try iArt Free →How lyric videos are made
The manual route is timeline animation — placing each word against the waveform in After Effects or a free alternative. The generated route describes the video to an AI motion graphics tool: we documented both, with real costs and a word-level sync test, in our step-by-step lyric video guide, and the tool built for it is iArt's lyric video maker.
Related Concepts
Related terms: kinetic typography, motion graphics.