Abstract: This work describes a validated procedure for collecting reference data to estimate personal values from song lyrics. The undertaken work describes our method for sampling songs for lyric annotation, the specific wording and response format of the annotation tool, and estimation of necessary number of annotations per song. We describe two waves of data collection with over 500 respondents each, the first as a method to estimate the necessary number of ratings using 20 songs, and the second to examine the structure of annotations on 360 songs. We show promising similarity in the structure of annotations when compared with the theoretical structure of personal values.