4 ms·

People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they f

People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.

mattw2121 7mo ago
Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
- lotsofpulp 7mo ago
  > If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades. But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
  - patates 7mo ago
    But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads. Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      That's why we had (and for that matter still have) webrings.
  - skeeter2020 7mo ago
    >> Anyone can still do this today But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste. >> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing. This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      Nobody could find it back in 1994 either! That was part of the fun. You stumbled on a webring or somebody's curated oracle and found a bunch of interesting weird tiny websites.
  - butlike 7mo ago
    I was trying to use a grain/chaff analogy to respond to your post, but I think there were just less crops in the old days. For the sites (crops) that were there, you had a lot more healthy ones. As spam and low-quality sites proliferated, the signal->noise ratio of sites got completely out-of-balance.
- jasode 7mo ago
  >If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a license. The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads. The legitimate ongoing licensing costs from Gracenote/Lyricfind for their catalogs of millions of song lyrics will cost significantly more than the hosting bill. The cost is beyond the resources of typical hobbyists who like to share information for free. EDIT: I have no idea what the downvotes are about. If you think my information about lyrics licensing is incorrect, explain why. Several decades ago, volunteers were sharing guitar tabs for free on the internet and that also got shut down by the music publishers because of copyright violations. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    There's a tension that the fan engagement is what really makes entertainers rich. The industry has every right to crack down, but if they do say they are really cutting their own legs off.
  - glenstein 7mo ago
    I think if there's any negative phrasing in your first three words, those reading from the Philosophers Chair (bathroom) are primed to take what immediately follows as Bad Vibes and downvote accordingly. They're not in this for accuracy. My hypothesis at least.
    - smcin 7mo ago
      Interesting. How would you rewrite the first sentence to sound positive?
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  So exactly when was this? Even Geocities was full of punch the monkey ads and the web was inundated with X10 pop under ads. Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam
  - tagami 7mo ago
    Pre-1995
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      The majority of internet users wouldn't have experienced that supposed world. The median age in the US in 39, which means at least half of all Americans would have been in elementary school or not around during that supposed era of the internet, and the mass adoption of the internet only really began in earnest in the early 2000s.
      - jodrellblank 7mo ago
        > "that supposed world ... that supposed era of the internet" "Supposed: Presumed to be true or real without conclusive evidence". You think there isn't conclusive evidence that the internet existed before 1995? o_O
        raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        We were all setting up Gopher servers?
        alephnerd 7mo ago
        As in "rose tinted glasses".
    - TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
      It was 96/97. I remember thinking "The drones are moving in on this." Canter and Siegel had nuked Usenet in 1994, and banners were invented in 1994 by Hotwired. But it took a while for the tech to eat the web, because the web was a niche interest for the first few years. During that time you could - and a lot of people did - put together a simple site with a text editor and free hosting supplied by your ISP.
- RGamma 7mo ago
  Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.
- dfxm12 7mo ago
  we lost the original vibe of the Internet. The signal (fan sites) to noise (sites focusing on revenue) ratio is way off today. The issues are that ad revenue generating sites are too plentiful, in some cases they are generated by code and they are more highly placed in search engine results. SEO and procedurally created content is where we lost the way (I think the lure of getting rich as a social media influencer or streamer further moved us away). I was looking for discussion around a brand new album last night (not King Crimson related...), like from an internet forum, reddit, even a review, but the first few pages of search results were all storefronts selling/streaming it, PR (not even reviews) or AI generated pages about the artist. The stuff I was looking for existed, but I only found it after adding "reddit" to the search terms. I was hoping to find a new forum similar to this one focused on that kind of music. Reddit is not ad free, but at least it has a raison d'etre beyond advertising... So, it's harder to find fan sites, and I'm sure fan site maintainers are less motivated to keep up for this reason (a more popular site is probably more fun to maintain). At least compare this to FOSS projects. I think findability is easier for those, and the popular ones are reasonably well maintained.
  - amanaplanacanal 7mo ago
    Were you using Google to search? Those fan sites don't serve up Google ads, so Google has no incentive to surface them for you. People keep telling me that Google lost against SEO, but in reality they just realized that SEO was good for their bottom line.
StableAlkyne 7mo ago
> And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason And others feel they are entitled to passive income by hastily throwing together IP they did not create and do not own, apparently. Everything has to be a side hustle and everyone has to take their cut as a middleman these days.
dfxm12 7mo ago
There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  ... and many other sins. I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc. The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it. Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is. Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them. Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?" I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
  - andrekandre 7mo ago
    > I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers. by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...
542354234235 7mo ago
No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads. Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
- scblock 7mo ago
  I mean there kind of is: https://lrclib.net/ https://lrclib.net/
  - smcin 7mo ago
    Ok but on that site you can't search by lyrics. Only by title.
- swiftcoder 7mo ago
  > Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
not_the_fda 7mo ago
You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music. Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
- cortesoft 7mo ago
  All the streaming apps have this feature, though?
  - filleduchaos 7mo ago
    You can't possibly expect people griping about services to actually use them, now can you
the_af 7mo ago
> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time. We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff. And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model. Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
marssaxman 7mo ago
That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
bombcar 7mo ago
In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there. Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
dspillett 7mo ago
There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site. Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
scubbo 7mo ago
> for some reason Jeez, man. This is just sad.
keybored 7mo ago
Why not? People will post apologia on behalf of ad corporations on the Internet, that too for free.

mattw2121 7mo ago

Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.

lotsofpulp 7mo ago
> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades. But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
- patates 7mo ago
  But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads. Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    That's why we had (and for that matter still have) webrings.
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  >> Anyone can still do this today But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste. >> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing. This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    Nobody could find it back in 1994 either! That was part of the fun. You stumbled on a webring or somebody's curated oracle and found a bunch of interesting weird tiny websites.
- butlike 7mo ago
  I was trying to use a grain/chaff analogy to respond to your post, but I think there were just less crops in the old days. For the sites (crops) that were there, you had a lot more healthy ones. As spam and low-quality sites proliferated, the signal->noise ratio of sites got completely out-of-balance.
jasode 7mo ago
>If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a license. The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads. The legitimate ongoing licensing costs from Gracenote/Lyricfind for their catalogs of millions of song lyrics will cost significantly more than the hosting bill. The cost is beyond the resources of typical hobbyists who like to share information for free. EDIT: I have no idea what the downvotes are about. If you think my information about lyrics licensing is incorrect, explain why. Several decades ago, volunteers were sharing guitar tabs for free on the internet and that also got shut down by the music publishers because of copyright violations. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  There's a tension that the fan engagement is what really makes entertainers rich. The industry has every right to crack down, but if they do say they are really cutting their own legs off.
- glenstein 7mo ago
  I think if there's any negative phrasing in your first three words, those reading from the Philosophers Chair (bathroom) are primed to take what immediately follows as Bad Vibes and downvote accordingly. They're not in this for accuracy. My hypothesis at least.
  - smcin 7mo ago
    Interesting. How would you rewrite the first sentence to sound positive?
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
So exactly when was this? Even Geocities was full of punch the monkey ads and the web was inundated with X10 pop under ads. Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam
- tagami 7mo ago
  Pre-1995
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    The majority of internet users wouldn't have experienced that supposed world. The median age in the US in 39, which means at least half of all Americans would have been in elementary school or not around during that supposed era of the internet, and the mass adoption of the internet only really began in earnest in the early 2000s.
    - jodrellblank 7mo ago
      > "that supposed world ... that supposed era of the internet" "Supposed: Presumed to be true or real without conclusive evidence". You think there isn't conclusive evidence that the internet existed before 1995? o_O
      - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        We were all setting up Gopher servers?
      - alephnerd 7mo ago
        As in "rose tinted glasses".
  - TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
    It was 96/97. I remember thinking "The drones are moving in on this." Canter and Siegel had nuked Usenet in 1994, and banners were invented in 1994 by Hotwired. But it took a while for the tech to eat the web, because the web was a niche interest for the first few years. During that time you could - and a lot of people did - put together a simple site with a text editor and free hosting supplied by your ISP.
RGamma 7mo ago
Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.
dfxm12 7mo ago
we lost the original vibe of the Internet. The signal (fan sites) to noise (sites focusing on revenue) ratio is way off today. The issues are that ad revenue generating sites are too plentiful, in some cases they are generated by code and they are more highly placed in search engine results. SEO and procedurally created content is where we lost the way (I think the lure of getting rich as a social media influencer or streamer further moved us away). I was looking for discussion around a brand new album last night (not King Crimson related...), like from an internet forum, reddit, even a review, but the first few pages of search results were all storefronts selling/streaming it, PR (not even reviews) or AI generated pages about the artist. The stuff I was looking for existed, but I only found it after adding "reddit" to the search terms. I was hoping to find a new forum similar to this one focused on that kind of music. Reddit is not ad free, but at least it has a raison d'etre beyond advertising... So, it's harder to find fan sites, and I'm sure fan site maintainers are less motivated to keep up for this reason (a more popular site is probably more fun to maintain). At least compare this to FOSS projects. I think findability is easier for those, and the popular ones are reasonably well maintained.
- amanaplanacanal 7mo ago
  Were you using Google to search? Those fan sites don't serve up Google ads, so Google has no incentive to surface them for you. People keep telling me that Google lost against SEO, but in reality they just realized that SEO was good for their bottom line.

StableAlkyne 7mo ago

> And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason And others feel they are entitled to passive income by hastily throwing together IP they did not create and do not own, apparently. Everything has to be a side hustle and everyone has to take their cut as a middleman these days.

dfxm12 7mo ago

There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.

PaulHoule 7mo ago
... and many other sins. I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc. The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it. Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is. Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them. Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?" I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
- andrekandre 7mo ago
  > I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers. by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...

542354234235 7mo ago

No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads. Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?

scblock 7mo ago
I mean there kind of is: https://lrclib.net/ https://lrclib.net/
- smcin 7mo ago
  Ok but on that site you can't search by lyrics. Only by title.
swiftcoder 7mo ago
> Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)

not_the_fda 7mo ago

You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music. Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.

cortesoft 7mo ago
All the streaming apps have this feature, though?
- filleduchaos 7mo ago
  You can't possibly expect people griping about services to actually use them, now can you

the_af 7mo ago

> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time. We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff. And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model. Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.

marssaxman 7mo ago

That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.

bombcar 7mo ago

In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there. Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.

dspillett 7mo ago

There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site. Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

scubbo 7mo ago

> for some reason Jeez, man. This is just sad.

keybored 7mo ago

Why not? People will post apologia on behalf of ad corporations on the Internet, that too for free.