HACKER Q&A
📣 thomassmith65

Is there even one 'song lyrics' website that isn't mickey mouse?


If you are about to respond to the question by submitting a site that accepts user-submitted lyrics... nope. That's what I mean by 'mickey mouse.'

The question has deeper ramifications than it might seem at first glance. The web is now supposed to be humanity's repository for knowledge. If a 'song lyrics' website accepts user-submissions and has lower standards than Wikipedia, the result is a website full of unreliable garbage. Lyrics sites are easy to verify – other more weighty sites may not be.

To find and list a song lyric should not be a 'hard problem'. Lyrics are not secret information – when an artist records a song, someone had better publish those lyrics if they want to safeguard their intellectual property.

If the web isn't reliable for something as common and popular as song lyrics, maybe it's a sign that the business models we have today aren't conducive to serious outfits.

If anyone here is a tech columnist, by the way, maybe this is worth writing about? Is it not a bit strange to have a billion people referring to 'lyrics' websites that list an entire song accurately perhaps 50% of the time?


  👤 082349872349872 Accepted Answer ✓
Lyrics used to come in liner notes; are there any fields in common music formats for metadata? I'm sure no one would notice <1k more.

👤 curtisblaine
genius.com?