Slashdot Mirror
Songfile (lyrics.ch) Trails Off
dave256 writes: "I was recently wandering about looking for some lyrics and CD track listings, and going to my good old standby, lyrics.ch (and summarily suffering through the redirection to songfile), I noticed a notice:'On September 30, 2001, the International Lyrics Server website will be closed and all lyrics will be removed from the Songfile web site.
Thank you for your support, and we appreciate your past patronage.
Please direct any questions or inquiries regarding this change to lyrics@harryfox.com.' Who was this masked harryfox.com? Boy was I (not) surprised. I for one will miss the old beast."
The lyrics.ch site has survived some tough times before, so perhaps this isn't really its end.
lyrics.ch was a great tool. I'm a poet (of sorts) and a musical artist. Not giving my audience access to my material doesn't make sense. Artists produce art to be enjoyed by others and to get themselves off.
By making the art harder to obtain keeps the audience from enjoying the art. It doesn't make sense. It's too ironic. It's not like the artist is going to be making much money selling song books and lyric books.
I know of one artist group that publishes their lyrics via the web, www.beastieboys.com. Let us support and rejoice in the Beastie Boys.
funk
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
I know your msg is now marked flamebait, but I want to comment anyway.
6000+ people dying in any way whatsoever is a human "tragedy". As another post said, more people died yesterday in equally morbid ways. What's special about the American saga is that the American people believed without a doubt that their safety and cherished freedom was untouchable.
During East Timor's crisis, my country, Australia, sent thousands of peace keepers into the trouble areas. We evacuated hundreds, if not thousands of refugees from East Timor, and returned those who wanted to go back safe and sound after the conflict ended. The statistic (and I hate to use that word) that was ignored most was this: over 20,000 people were killed before we lifted an administrative finger to help.
Those figures are ignored because East Timor and the region isn't considered a "civilised" region if the Westernised sense. East Timer took maybe 15 minutes of TV news a day here. America took over 4 days, non-stop. Why is this?
America, the free country, whose populace is on the whole ignorant to other country's racial wars, just had it's foot trod on, and now expects every other country to pay complete and utter attention while it rants about destroying economies and further un-balancing the world's trade weight.
Now, I'm no bigot on either side here. Australia plays just a small part of the global game, but it's culture is very close to America's. I won't pretend that I'm not a heavy-handed consumer, and sure I enjoy the freedom a "democracy" provides. However, the world is more than the US.
Next time Timor erupts, or something else just as horrific surfaces and gets a whopping 5 minutes of airtime just before the new series of Friends or reruns of Buffy, maybe paying a little more attention to what your country had to do with it, both to help and to provoke. Iran & Iraq came about because of meddling. Hussein was funded by the States. Osama was funded by the States.
Maybe not double-dipping in every global situation would keep America safe? Democracy, freedom, and all those other buzzwords come to be because somewhere, someone paid a price in the beginning. Call it tall poppy syndrome, but if America wants to be as loud and arrogant in its' world view, it should also realise that others will want to take it down.
This was coming... Tuesday was just the day it arrived. 6000+ died not because they deserved to, but because of Governmental arrogance that one was right and all else is wrong... and both sides contributed to this.
The `/. trolls would come out to tell him that it wasn't a real troll, since it didn't scream 'First Post'... -alexjohns
It was killed because the big companies had already realised (pre-Napster) that in order to continue spewing the silliness they tried to allege in courts, they had to control every aspect of the music they published and take every case of "infringement" seriously. US law requires this to some extent, but Sony, Warner and Bertelsmann are willing to go that extra mile.
The spread of lyrics for any song -- even from this week's latest gyrating girl or cool neat-o boy group -- enhances sales. However, in order to control the copyrights, the publishers will not even license rights to reproduce these lyrics. Instead, you must go to the band's official site (usually within the record company's domain), where you can not only see the lyrics (if you provide enough personal information), but you also have the "opportunity" to buy lots more merchandise. You are a "consumer".
So forget something sensible, like the centralised, optimised and simplified lyrics.ch database. Give up on ideas that make life a little easier for "consumers" but might deny a copyright holder a possible extra $0.00013 from a banner impression.
Of course, you can always search Google for "<band name> AND <song title> AND (lyrics OR text OR words)" and find the lyrics elsewhere. Works for finding guitar tabs, too. But the centralised database which was organised to provide you with the information you wanted -- how you wanted it -- instead of advertising and enticement to further purchase is history.
I already mourned the loss of this site almost four years ago. What HFA did to it once they got control made it unusable. I haven't been there since.
woof.
If I had a penny for every Goth girl Web page with Cure lyrics, I'd have $89,317.74
So the corporations want to make money from you and you don't want them to.
So stop buying their stuff.
Stop buying CDs. Make your own music. See live music. Stop buying DVDs. Stop seeing blockbusters. Go to the theatre. Support your local independent filmmakers.
That will hurt the big guns and support those who really need it. Who cares if you don't get to see or hear the latest stuff: it's mostly rubbish, you certainly won't suffer for the lack of it, and hell, you might even learn something new.
And that is the point the idiots totally fail to see, (and sadly so do many of those posting here at slashdot).
That's exactly what I used to use the lyrichs server for. I would hear some words to a song, not know what it was, then go look it up so I could purchase the CD.
This was a unique search engine. There really was no other way to figure out a song's title and artist based on what you heard. What is wrong with HFA? Are they REALLY this stupid, thinking the main use of this site was so that people could somehow rip-off the artists? I'm sure any cover band who wants to play a song would buy the sheet music, with lyrics, if they needed to. But you can't do what lyrics.ch did if your only resource is to buy sheet music. You can't search lyrics on paper to figure out a songname, just like you can't go to a library and read EVERY BOOK just to figure out where a certain passage was quoted.
musicians would learn to pronounce the words clearly enough so we dumb foreigners could make any sense of them =)
I'd just be happy if the dumb fsck radio dj's would tell you what songs they've played.
East coast, Mid-west, West Coast, it's the same all over, damn few will tell you, which I really fail to understand, since the RIAA are so rabid about profits, but you can't by music you don't know whose or what it is! I've gone years not buying a CD because all I get is dumb looks when I try to describe it in music shops. "Well it goes, hmm hmm hmmmmm hmm hmmmm and lada dee dum dum doo doo doowop"
After the lawyers, I've got a pretty good idea who should be next up against the wall when the revolution comes.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No, a large amount of people have *stopped* buying music since Napster fell apart, and music sharing splintered into 15 million rival protocols.
The time when I bought most albums was when I had a nice broadband connection and Napster was in its heyday -- in conjunction with cdnow.com it let me listen to lots of artists which I'd not heard about before. Now I buy much less music, and from a narrower base of artists.
The year that the music industry was declaring that file sharing would destroy music buying, revenues from CD sales went *up*.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
If your band didnt 'make it big' maybe it's because they're making shit music that nobody wants to see live? People are STUPID if they think they can live off being in a band without HARD WORK! And even then, it's not guaranteed, just like life. Always have a backup skill..
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
And, by the way, if you're not gigging at least four nights out of the week, your band is a hobby. You should have a fucking day job.
These talentless yahoos who run the recording industry know that technology will soon put them out of a job. The only reason for a record industry to exist is that you needed a lot of capital to press a n old fashoned vinel album. Now, with only a few thousand dollars, anyone can record and burn a CD as good in quality as one made by the recording industry ( of course, you need to have technical and musical talent :)
The only musicians who support the recording industry are those who've gotten really rich or hope to do so. But, like any gold rush, the rock and roll gold rush is over. Too many people now know how to play an electric guitar. Musicians can still be successful, but the days of instant riches for the lucky few are coming to a close.
That is how it should be. Talented, hard working people will always be able to make a living. The musicians who figure out how to make money w/o the record companies will be fruitful and happy.
The record industry is in a mad rush to frighten people out of their fair-use rights, using legal terrorism.
Not that I'd encourage anyone to do such a thing. But it'd be kinda nice to see if someone were to independently come up with the idea of doing it.
Or even better, put them in some sort of de-centralized system (freenet? gnutella?) that isn't susceptable as someone like napster and the like.
Sadly, I didn't mirror anything from the original server, though it got me a lot of the information I needed at the time...