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Ask HN: 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?
- curtisblaine 4y agogenius.com?
- thomassmith65 4y agoGenius is the ultimate source of music knowledge, created by scholars like you from around the world* 'Scholars like you' is a euphemism for 'random 12-year old ESL students trying to win internet points by posting misheard garbage'. If that is overly harsh, it is still closer to reality than any claim that 'genius' is a reliable source of music lyrics. All 'genius' is, is dirt cheap to operate – a money grab. It absolutely is not fit for any serious use, and harms the world (well, to whatever extent arts knowledge impacts the world) by infecting it with a deluge of incorrect information. *https://genius.com/Genius-how-genius-works-annotated https://genius.com/Genius-how-genius-works-annotated
- 082349872349872 4y agoLyrics 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.