Thinking about making a lyrics website

[Alex P]

Ive been thinking of making a lyrics website for a while, and maybe a section like myspace bands or somthing, im bouncing ideas at the moment. Has anyone done this before, got any tips etc??

:hearts:

 

[Alex P]

No one ?

 

[Cate.tv]

I think this is a great idea Alex! - what name you have in mind? You ever look at Blog - Lovejingles.com - great guys .... Model hasn't taken off as well as they'd hope.....yet

Thanks again for all your help tonite Alex .... I truly appreciate it/YOU !

 

[Barrucadu]

There are many lyrics websites; what special thing will yours do?

Not trying to sound harsh, but there are many.

 

[Alex P]

Ah well it wont be a general lyrics site, I don't want to appeal to the masses, im a big fan of metal music so im thinking of using that as a base. Ive got a name I think.

Also I read somewhere that lyric websites, are technically illegal due to copyright :O

 

[Barrucadu]

So, it'll be a lyrics website focusing on metal, but what then? Why would metal fans (such as me) use your website and not another? I'm just trying to get an idea for what would make your site special.

Things you could possibly include:

• Upcoming album releases
• Last.fm integration ("click here to listen/see the video")
• A good search utility. Many sites fail horribly at this (I want to be able to search by band/album/track/year/genre…)

 

[Alex P]

Ugh sorry for the late reply, ive been thinking seriously about it, im thinking a lot now in terms of community, I love online community's but keeping the lyrics aspects in with it. Your multi search idea is fantastic, news is really a big thing but un sure how to go about it. At the moment im just reading over and over about everything that can be related to what I want to do.

 

[jbj]

I have made a guitar tabs site using WordPress (see my signature). My plan was to downloads tabs from P2P and use a homemade php script to automatically insert them in WordPress.

You should consider this option for your lyrics site.

 

[Obulus]

I have a database full of lyrics :L

Go for it

 

[sote]

check out LetsSingIt, the lyrics site, they let the users moderate the lyrics, that way its very low maintenance. Was gonna build a lyrics website myself, but dropped it somewhere along the way.

 

[Bla2e]

Well, it'd be unique as you are including MySpace Bands too
Go on !

 

[Alex P]

Found a name, currently looking at what scripts i can use together or whether it would be best working from scratch as Barrucadu said I don't want anything that is just a carbon copy of all of the other sites so i need some special features.

 

[RLW]

Found a name, currently looking at what scripts i can use together or whether it would be best working from scratch as Barrucadu said I don't want anything that is just a carbon copy of all of the other sites so i need some special features.

You really do need to be unique, and I've found the best way to do this is to code from scratch.

I have a site that is essentially a lyrics site - Music-Whiz.com Music Database . I've found it tough to get google search engine rankings for major bands/musicians with the lyrics keyword. Most of the big lyrics websites have been around for a long, long time. Not saying that it can't be done, but it'll be tough. So my advice is to have lyrics on your site, but try to make sure you have something else to pull the search engine visitors in.

 

[Erdy]

I have an idea. How about collective intelligence type lyrics site? Let me explain:

On amazon when you view an item it says "people who like this also liked these"
Similarly, on delicious.com, which is a bookmarking site, it shows people's bookmarks with the number of people who have that site bookmarked.

The idea is very simple. If I like a certain musician, I would like to get some suggestion about what else I might like based on interests of other people who also like the musician/s I like. This requires some advanced programming. For instance if I like 3 musicians and there is enough number of people who also like the same 3 musicians then you can take data from them. But if there isn't, then you might also add some more people who have two matching musicians with me.

Creating such a site could be real fun. I used to listen to Pandora Internet radio until they stopped broadcasting to the UK because of legal reasons. That radio used to bring up suggestions based on only one musician I selected. And they were generally very good. Although their system had a technical background, and wasn't based on user selections.

This brings me to the fact that I own a high quality music domain that I should develop myself.

 

[Tia Wood]

Lyric sites are hard to launch because of the competition. Also, I recall something about lyric sites being possibly subjected to copyright issues so be careful.

 

[Alex P]

You really do need to be unique, and I've found the best way to do this is to code from scratch.

I have a site that is essentially a lyrics site - Music-Whiz.com Music Database . I've found it tough to get google search engine rankings for major bands/musicians with the lyrics keyword. Most of the big lyrics websites have been around for a long, long time. Not saying that it can't be done, but it'll be tough. So my advice is to have lyrics on your site, but try to make sure you have something else to pull the search engine visitors in.

Ive been really thinking about doing the website from scratch, the problem is I do not know php nor mysql, ive been looking over php recently and picking up basics, the only problem is that time is against me as such, I will be going back to university in September and the last thing I want to be doing is thinking about this project and not concentrating on my uni work (story of my life aha). Hiring a coder could be very costly for what I have in mind, so im still thinking about it.

I agree on your point about not only having lyrics but having something else on the site, it would be foolish to just have lyrics, would be very very hard to compete with the established lyrics site.

I have an idea. How about collective intelligence type lyrics site? Let me explain:

On amazon when you view an item it says "people who like this also liked these"
Similarly, on delicious.com, which is a bookmarking site, it shows people's bookmarks with the number of people who have that site bookmarked.

The idea is very simple. If I like a certain musician, I would like to get some suggestion about what else I might like based on interests of other people who also like the musician/s I like. This requires some advanced programming. For instance if I like 3 musicians and there is enough number of people who also like the same 3 musicians then you can take data from them. But if there isn't, then you might also add some more people who have two matching musicians with me.

Creating such a site could be real fun. I used to listen to Pandora Internet radio until they stopped broadcasting to the UK because of legal reasons. That radio used to bring up suggestions based on only one musician I selected. And they were generally very good. Although their system had a technical background, and wasn't based on user selections.

This brings me to the fact that I own a high quality music domain that I should develop myself.

Thats a really nice idea, and absolutely something I will look into adding, if possible and good luck if you decide to develop your domain. Thanks for your post!

Lyric sites are hard to launch because of the competition. Also, I recall something about lyric sites being possibly subjected to copyright issues so be careful.

Yeah copyright is a issue, something I will be looking into as there's big implementations with it. And no one said anything is easy but at the end of the day if you don't try you wont achieve anything

 

[probafix]

Every lyric that is likely to be of interest to a significant number of visitors is protected by copyright; virtually every lyric site out there (and there seem to be thousands) is 90%+ illegal.

 

[khassandra]

I used to have a lyrics blog and I was getting traffic but I stopped it as I was worried about copyright issues. In converted that blog into an entertainment blog instead.

 

[RLW]

I did a bit of research a little while back. I can't remember exactly, but I seem to remember finding a figure of about $25,000 Australian per year to legally show most lyrics.

Then it get's tricky as to whether that is enough. If my site is hosted in Australia does that only allow Australian's to view the lyrics legally. Do I need to pay royalties separately in each region.

I think that if you received correspondence from a label saying you are violating copyright and you take the lyrics down permanently, there shouldn't be too much of an issue - especially if you haven't made any money off them.

 

[ToniS]

Watch this How A Teenage Entrepreneur Built A Profitable Lyrics Site – with Milun Tesovic interview first. About the dude that runs metrolyrics.com and how he made shitload of money. You`ll need the inspiration since the competition in that niche is fierce.