The traditional allowance for fair use quotations was I believe originally developed so that anyone reviewing a poem or novel could quote (briefly) in order to illustrate a point. The problem is that "briefly" isn't easy to define. If you quote all the lines of a three-line haiku, you are reproducing the entire poem, which would most likely be an infringement of a poet's rights. ("How can I get the rewards for my intellectual property if anyone can find the entire haiku online?")

However, quoting a brief speech from Proust's multivolume opus would certainly be acceptable.

Given the indeterminatability (my coinage) of the safe length, your decision is a clean choice. I think that writers for Plethora could still link to a lyrics site (preferably under the administration of the original author, but how often does that happen).

One could use the "If this were your song, would you feel injured by the quotation" standard, but ultimately this is the subjective determination of the quoter.

This is an often-confused distinction, but giving credit to an author relieves the quoter from the charge of plagiarism, but plagiarism and copyright violation are two entirely separate categories.

Plagiarism is in general a non-legal / academic distinction. If I quote Abraham Lincoln verbatim but I seem to claim that the quote is my own idea / thought, then I am violating plagiarism standards, but there is no copyright infringement. Conversely, if I quote Taylor Swift and give credit to her in my article, I am not plagiarizing, but I may still be violating copyright law (or not--it's vague).

I'm going to throw out another complexity: the use of photos of the album cover or the original record (in the case of 78 rpms). In general, album art is copyrighted by the record label. Giving them credit relieves the writer from plagiarism charges but not from charges of copyright infringement. Theoretically, you should request permission from the label before publishing cover art, but reviewers rarely if ever do this, so it would seem labels aren't about to seek an injunction against someone publishing an album cover photo. Still, if you want to be pure in your standards, even a photo of an album that you have purchased is not your intellectual property.