ASK STEVE #4 - Idea Brainstorm for MusicExplained.net
By Steve Poland • July 31, 2007
Hi Steve,
Have you ever stayed up late at nite pondering what the deeper meaning of 50 Cents smash hit “in the club” was?
Is it a metaphor for life? Well maybe not, but this is the premise of www.musicexplained.net, developed and co/founded by myself and by my founding partner.
musicexplained is -
-a reference point for song lyrics, meanings and interpretations
-a social network with all the usual network features
-a resource like urban dictionary where users vote for the most interesting, plausible or humorous explanations
Right now, content is king and we are at a loss how to obtain this without having to input a zillion lyrics ourselves, which kinda defeats the purpose.
So what ideas do you have to promote, generating content and any other suggested thoughts?
As a side-note, enjoy your blog immensely and glad to see new posting being made.
All the best
Andrew
I like the idea — I’m an obsessive music fan, but not so much with lyrics. I’m more about beats and rhythms — unless I’m going through a break-up, then I’m listening to every single lyric in every single song. But I think there’s a market for people that love to discuss lyrics (and poetry).
I think there are Rights issues with lyrics — there are tons of lyrics websites out there that republish lyrics, but I don’t think they have the rights to do so. Yahoo recently launched a lyrics search engine — I don’t know if they secured lyrics for all of them or what.
I think you need to get the lyrics. Find out if you need rights to reprint them — if you don’t, then I’d go scraping some other lyrics websites (using an offline web browser possibly — or some kind of linux-based crawler). Without lyrics, I think you’re in a bit of a bind — it’s an assumption that if I’m going to discuss lyrics on a site, that I’d read the lyrics there.
You also need to get artist names populated into your database. Look at either scraping (once again), or becoming an affiliate of Amazon.com or iTunes — and getting a product data feed sent over to you. Then parse the feed, rip out the artist names, and populate them into your DB. Or look at like Musicbrainz.org or I’m sure there are other artist databases that exist out there (definitely ones you can pay big bucks for from Muze or AMG).
Then you need to get people — users — a community formed. Easiest way to tap into a preformed community seems to be building your site as a Facebook application initially. Then people start seeing friends in their news feeds — “Steve Poland just explained how ‘Gin & Juice’ by Snoop Doggy Dogg changed his life.”
You could focus on both meanings of lyrics, but maybe also what people’s experiences/remembrances are with each song? Songs trigger memories — I’m sure everyone has specific memories for many many songs out there (like your first kiss with someone, etc).
Last.fm allows users to comment on specific songs — but doesn’t have lyrics (probably because of the Rights issue I’d assume).
Also, you’re using parameters in your search query for a specific artist’s page. I’m just being anal with this comment, but I’d get rid of parameters — make it easy like “www.musicexplained.com/modest_mouse/dashboard/” — I think this would help with your organic SEO efforts as well. You can do this cool little trick by using your 404 page — basically, when the server doesn’t see that page exists, it’ll call your 404 page, in which you’ll have a script that knows how to break that URL up — and can then display ... — but the user (and search engine) simply sees the proper page load (with the URL of ... ).
Overall, not something I’d personally pursue given what I believe to be a Rights issue with the lyrics — and lyrics seem essential to being on this idea’s website.
Comments
10 Responses to “ASK STEVE #4 - Idea Brainstorm for MusicExplained.net”
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Actually explaining the lyrics should fall under the fair-use clause so long as you don’t publish the full original yourself. If an online resource with the full lyrics exists just link to it.
Maybe you can add a word swapping tool so that people can define that the word X actually means Y and see the explained/translated lyrics.
To be honest I don’t really think the record companies would be too bothered about you publishing lyrics. After all if you have links to Amazon or iTunes you could end up generating more revenue for them.
Your idea sort of reminds me of a feature in Amarok. It has a sidebar on the left which can display lyrics or the Wikipedia page for an artist. You could trall Wikipedia if you need information relating to artists.
Launching in conjunction w/ an F8 app is definitely the way to go. I would also suggest a video/multi-media element for people to upload things they create about the lyrics. I’m sure that there would be some “performances” or Slideshows of different interpretations that would be very entertaining.
I think a similar idea for films would be great. I’ve often wanted to read more into people’s thought on the meanings and idea behind certain films (Vanilla Sky) comes to mind.
“To be honest I don’t really think the record companies would be too bothered about you publishing lyrics. ”
Huh??? Where have you been for the last 10 years? Didn’t you read about a TON of lawsuits that have resulted from people hosting lyrics? One of the most famous ones was lyrics.ch. Here’s what Wikipedia says:
“The International Lyrics Server was a Swiss web site devoted to hosting user-supplied song lyrics. Begun in February of 1997, it was hosting over 100,000 songs and receiving a million page views every day by its close in 1999. On January 14, 1999, Swiss police raided the apartment and the ISP of the International Lyrics Server’s creator Pascal de Vries and seized equipment in pursuit of a criminal copyright violation complaint filed on behalf of eight music publishing companies including Polygram, EMI, and Estefan Enterprises. Now the previous domain name for the site, ..., redirects to a different online lyrics database.”
I would look at one of your biggest competitors in the lyrics space: ...
You can buy a database of lyrics cheap (100-200$), I would break that into chunks of 50-100 and pay college kids to upload them as users. (c:
Then I would push advertising very hard on adwords, including site targeted ads on ..., perhaps telling people why they should post them on your site instead? Pay them maybe?
I would also invest in the .com if you are serious about making this a long term site… otherwise you are just increasing the value of the .com in the long run.
Lastly, about what Steve said on the 404, you would actually use what is called a mod rewrite if it is on apache. Also you would most likely want to stay away from using a 404, and opt for a 301 redirect I am guessing.
Good luck with the project.
Hi, I am the founder of Musicexplained
Initially, thank you Steve for taking the time to have a look at the site, and provide such beneficial advice.
It seems like lyrics are the biggest issue, which worries me a bit as I have put so much work into the site, I wouldn’t want to have to take the site down because of legal issues. Essentially this site has been my life for the last couple of months, and I feel very passionately about it.
I have seem similar projects where they state in the legal sections that the lyrics are available on site only for discussion and research purposes, and that the lyrics are only the interpretations of the user who submits them, not necessarily a 100% correct representation, and these sites have been allowed to operate. So I presumed it was ok as long as it was not for profit.
Getting artist names into the database is pretty straightforward, lyrics are a bit more time consuming, was wondering why you suggest an offline web browser for this??
The facebook idea is fantastic, being able to see peoples activity in the newfeed is ideal, as it’s a way of advertising the service to your other facebook friends. We will definitely be pursuing this avenue….
The Clean URL tactic using the 404 is also a fantastic method, as I had actually been trying to do this myself and couldn’t find any easy way to achieve it. I will be implementing this also onto the site.
Finally, me and the co;/founder think Colin Dowlings multimedia idea is great, and would push the project further. Having video, audio, or visual song explanations would give the site that extra punch…and be extremely entertaining as Colin points out,
Anyway…bit of a long post, but as I say I am very passionate about the project and
members of the site are really, really enjoying it so far.
Thanks
Hey guys, thx for the brilliant comments. Its seems the sticky point is the right to publish the lyrics or not as it appears to be. I will have to investigate this further and certainly creating links with Amazon and itunes may help. The Facebook platform is a killer so will be pursuing this.
Do you think placing the lyrics on the site and then referencing it could be an idea or just add the link?
You think a simple application for facebook as the one Steve mentions or has anyone got any other “bolt” on suggestions to add “added value” ?
Cheers
Sounds like a good idea. But it’s the focus on users that would make it viral. Take for instance ... it’s in Chinese, but it focus very nicely on the user’s perception on the music. It’s like a dedication music channel, to share experiences on a particular music, etc.
If you’re looking for lyrics, a good yet safe(r) place to reap them is ...
Similar to SongFacts (http://www.songfacts.com/), which has been out for a long time now. Good luck though!