If someone were to ask me about an example of wasted time and effort, I’d point to Yahoo’s partnership with Gracenote. A centralized, official database of lyrics is a solid idea. The implementation of tying into their search results is a fine, obvious idea.However, Techcrunch notes that, “copyright restrictions force them to show lyrics as an image instead of free text, to avoid scraping.” It’s inane restrictions like this that give piracy a capitalistic, if not moral, platform to flourish. So I can either go the legal route and use an end product which is almost completely inferior to the illegal route of finding lyrics on one of a million fan sites. My question as a consumer in a capitalistic society, is why? What’s my motivation?
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May 8th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Seems like bs to me. for one, how is it that making the lyrics an image prohibits scraping? Why do you think that they make captcha bots?! It seems like a bad idea poorly implemented.
May 8th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Absolutely. The concept of “official lyrics” is fine, seems like a basic req to play the game. But when you release a completely crippled product, the question is why release anything at all? The world hasn’t changed one iota before and after the Yahoo/Gracenote partnership.
May 9th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Hey sorry you hate the image. Obviously this was not Yahoo!’s restriction, it was imposed by the publishers.
I don’t think the product is “completely crippled”, though. Most people are just going to want to read the lyrics, which you can do. Not easy to copy/paste, and I agree that would be useful, but it’s better than not having the lyrics at all, IMHO.
ian (@ Yahoo! Music)
May 11th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
oh, i know it wasn’t yahoo’s restriction. it’s more of a harangue on the entertainment industry’s misguided attempts at control. the problem i have with the implementation is it’s not user-friendly and the restrictions seem inane, especially compared to what you can do with what’s currently available. It’s not as if lyrics are difficult to find, although i realize that lyrics sites are generally ad-ridden, so there’s a tradeoff.
anyway, i’m a ymj subscriber, so i’m curious to see how you guys implement it into the software. i think that’s an area where simple viewing will be useful. it would at least bring usage of the software more to the forefront.