Song Lyrics Without the Suck

Over the past few years I’ve been involved with a number of music-related web projects, including Loudwerkz, DMOD (RIP), and Ink19. Although I make my living on the web and love what I do, I suppose I’ve always been secretly jealous of those snobby record store employees who hear the latest cuts first, troll naive customers, and argue with their coworkers about song meanings :).

Fortunately, the web has lowered the bar to all of that stuff. What would we do without Pandora, Last.fm, and (more recently) Turntable? The one missing piece for me has always been a good song lyrics site. Sure, there are lots of lyrics engines on the web, but they’re all dreadfully designed, spam-centric, and just scuzzy feeling in general. Search for lyrics for your favorite song on Google, and you’re bound to end up looking at popup ads for diet pills.

If you’re like me, this makes you sad. And irritated. So there I was, bitching about this on Twitter one evening, when Seth Banks proposed that we actually do something about it. So we did.

Last week, Seth and I launched Lyricful, which aims to be the first classy lyrics site. We started with a nice clean design and paired it with a sizable lyrics database (growing every day), an intuitive search interface, and some SEO know-how. We’ve also added a few other things we felt fans would find useful, like song previews, concert information, and easy sharing features.

Most importantly, Lyricful isn’t running any invasive eyeball-bleeding advertising. The only ads on the site are in the form of song preview links and concert ticket referrals, relevant to the artist you’re currently browsing (which directly benefits the artist). We built this for ourselves, as music lovers and fans, which means that we wanted to make it as easy as possible to get right to transcribing, discussing, and sharing your favorite lyrics.

Since the soft launch, we’ve started working with a number of artists who were interested in Lyricful and its sister site, MusicNewsHQ. To start with, we’ve added featured / verified artist spots, which will help promote up and coming artists and ensure accuracy of the site contents. Double win. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this project evolves, having both artists and their fans involved in the process. Got feedback for us? We’d love to hear it!