Journal commenting is back

Posted on February 3, 2013 by brian

I am happy to announce that journal commenting is back. Unfortunately this is one feature that didn’t make the cut for the initial round of the new version we launched last July. It took way too long, but I’m glad it is finally here. As I’ve said in the past, journals are a great feature of the site. Despite my lack of updating mine, I enjoy reading other journals and getting a glimpse into the lives of other SM-ers and how music is a part of it all.

We’ve also ported over all existing journal comments from the old site. If you want to make your journal private or disable commenting, you can update your preferences at any time. Hover over your name in the upper right-hand corner and choose Journal, then click the Settings button in the “Your Journal” side cart.

We hope that this feature will help to continue the use of journals on the site. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions regarding journal comments or even just the journals themselves.

Brian

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Lyric Editing

Posted on August 18, 2012 by brian

We’ve just rolled out a new feature that will allow users to edit lyrics they’ve submitted. This is a feature that users have been requesting for some time, so we’re excited to make it available. To edit lyrics you’ve submitted, navigate to the lyric page and look for the “Edit Lyrics” link towards the top.

If the lyrics are licensed, the corrections you submit will not go live immediately. These changes are sent to the licensor to verify and correct, if they determine the changes are needed. This could take 24 hour or 24 days. Unfortunately our hands our tied on this, but know we work closely with them to get corrections made to improve the accuracy and quality of the content on SongMeanings.

We’re also looking into allowing users to edit lyrics they did not submit. This takes a certain amount of trust, so we’re going to require either that you are a Trusted User or have a certain number of points accumulated (points are a new feature we’ll take about soon, but are directly related to trust and growing the community/quality content on SM). We’ll announce more on this as we implement the changes.

Another great benefit from this feature is that it will further encourage people to post lyrics that they personally write. We love to see people to share their music/lyrics with the world through SongMeanings, even if they’re not a signed band/artist. We believe that technology today has made it significantly easier to get your music out there. This is is a great thing, and we want to be a part of it from the lyrical perspective. Whether it is a means to get your name/lyrics out there, or a way to solicit feedback on your writing skills, we want to be a part of your passion.

So if you’re an artist or songwriter, feel free to add yourself to our directory and post your lyrics for the world to enjoy. We’d love to help promote you as well; shoot us an email so we can chat.

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Welcome to 2012 SongMeanings

Posted on July 3, 2012 by brian

If you hadn’t notice (and we certainly tried to make sure you did), we’ve launched a completely new look to SongMeanings. Internally we’re calling this SM4, as it is is officially our 4th revision (even thought SM2 never truly made it out the door).

The biggest change you’re going to see is that we’ve moved away from the white page with thin blue or orange-bordered boxes. This was actually pretty difficult, because we always took pride in the text-heavy approach of SM. Like Craigslist, it was the simple, easy-to-use interface that made SM stand apart from other, image-heavy sites. This was years ago though, and the world wide web is a much different place now. Web 2.0 and flash have come (and gone in some cases), and we kept on without making any changes. However, the time came where the old design was too limiting and wouldn’t allow us to easily build in the new features we have planned, so we set out to re-design the site.

When working on the new design, we insisted that the old “feel” of SM was maintained, and I think we’ve accomplished that. We found a great UI/UX designer who we worked closely with throughout the entire process, from wire-framing to color selection to fully built design. In addition to being more visually appealing, the site flows better and aims to call users to action to interact more. This is a good thing, as we want people to visit, to stay to learn and discover new music, and to provide their input as well.

Making a change to the layout of a site can be a risky move. We knew this going in, and made sure to maintain all the great features of SongMeanings but to promote and enhance them, as opposed to completely re-doing them. We’ve also introduced several new features, such as album commenting, a new homepage with articles, reviews and updates, and an improved search with a new “All” option. This platform will allow us to further improve the SM experience and introduce newer features that fans have been asking for.

We’re excited to bring you the new SongMeanings. We love the new look and feel and are excited for the opportunities this opens up for us. We hope you feel the same way–we’d love to hear your comments, so please let us know by sending a note (good or otherwise!) to love@songmeanings.net

Posted in Design, New Feature, SongMeanings | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

SF MusicTech 10

Posted on February 5, 2012 by brian

Last May, Mike and I attended our first (and the 8th) SF MusicTech Summit in San Francisco. We didn’t know what to expect, but returned energized and excited about things to come. Since that time, we’ve begun serving officially licensed lyrics, developed many new business relationships, fought SOPA/PIPA, and have a lot of other items in the works (that we’ll be talking about soon!).

I am stoked once again, as we’re heading back out to San Fran for the 10th SF MusicTech Summit on February 13th, 2012. The new business cards are hot off the press and we’re looking to make this trip even more beneficial than the last. We look forward to meeting with some existing business friends and forging new relationships–all with the goal of improving SongMeanings and making it the best music/lyric site out there.

Keeping the momentum going…

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The decision to go dark/You guys rock!

Posted on January 18, 2012 by brian

Mike and I talked about joining the SOPA strike for several days, but we weren’t sure exactly how to go about it. This morning we started with a blackout page with the Fight For the Future video and a link to their SOPA STRIKE page. We knew going dark was the right thing to do to raise awareness, but we didn’t know how people would react. A couple hours into it, Mike had a great idea to solicit feedback from our users, and all I can say is WOW. The amount of feedback (almost all positive) was tremendous, it blew our minds and solidified that we had made the right choice. Every time I looked at my phone, I had 8, 21, 30, 44 new messages! At the time of this writing, we had over 375 and counting.

Many of you already know, but for those of you that don’t, in 2011 SongMeanings became one of the few lyric sites to display legal licensed lyrics. This is important for many reasons: one, because it is the right thing do to. We are not pirates, and we are not thieves. We are music lovers passionate about discussing and discovering lyrics and new music. Second, we agree that fundamentally copyright is a good thing. The problem is that the copyright law has not kept up with the digital age, and laws like SOPA and PIPA are NOT the way to go about fighting illegal activity. Third, we wanted to ensure that we were around for the long haul. We want to continue to build and evolve SongMeanings to not only the best lyric site on the web, but one of the best music destinations. We didn’t get in this to make money and run; we got in this for the love of music, and for the unbelievable feeling you get when you see people connecting through music.

Reading the emails today (I haven’t gotten through all of them yet, but I do plan to read them all) only made an already great feeling even better. It is an amazing thing to get emails from all over the world, showing support of both our protest AND professing love of the site. To know that you guys are visiting on a daily basis and couldn’t imagine a world without SongMeanings is truly humbling.

So to all 375+ of you that emailed, and the thousands that visit SM every day, we want to thank you for supporting the site and supporting us in our protest against short-sighted laws like SOPA and PIPA. Together we can ensure the Internet stays open and free, and that SongMeanings (and all the other great sites out there) will continue to be a part of it.

Brian and Mike

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LyricFind Updates

Posted on October 27, 2011 by mike

We’re about two months into our agreements with LyricFind and our transition has mostly gone smoothly.  The rough patches, mainly disabling copy+paste on licensed lyrics and disabling user submitted lyrics (for licensed lyrics), are being ironed out. 

Regarding copy+paste, I’m confident we’ll eventually see this removed.  I like to think of this aspect of the agreement somewhat like the original iTunes DRM.  The DRM made no sense back then and the labels were pretty quick to realize this; eventually removing DRM from most, if not all, tracks.  The copy+paste restriction on lyrics, I’m sure, will be removed eventually as it makes no sense besides pissing off the end user.  Lyrics naturally want to be shared. 

When we agreed with LyricFind to implement their licensed lyrics, it meant overwriting user-submitted lyrics with officially licensed lyrics.  While we were a bit nervous about how our user-base would feel about this, we felt some comfort knowing we’d be adding over a million new lyrics to our database.  But still even such an increase would not make a user feel any better about their submitted lyrics.  So what to do about this?

I had a quick conversation with the LyricFind guys about this that went rather successfully.  And in the end, our agreements will allow us to actually display the user-submitted lyrics alongside the official licensed lyrics.  I haven’t quited figured out how to implement this task because doing it side-by-side would clutter the page even more so.  I’m thinking the official lyrics will be shown as default (because they have to as per our agreement) and the user can then select ‘Alternate Version’ which scrolls down the original user submitted lyrics. 

Last week, we implemented about 60,000 new artists into our database from LyricFind.  These last few nights, I’ve been working on the code to bring in about 300,000 new albums.  Once the albums are in the database, we’ll work on adding the million or so new lyrics from LyricFind.  It’s a pain in the ass to do which is why it’s taking so long.

That’s all I have for today. 

Cheers,

Mike

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Tagging Comments

Posted on October 6, 2011 by mike

Last night, we implemented a feature to allow everone to tag each and every song comment on SongMeanings.  This tagging allows us to provide great metadata around the comments and will allow us to really refine them. 

First, it allow us to expand outward providing services to other network and sites who want to tap into the content of SongMeanings.  We’re in the initial phase of this and we’ll have plenty more to talk about in the coming weeks.

Next — and this is what I’m really excited about — is that this metadata will allow us to essentially describe the song in a nutshell.  While just tagging the song would capture this data (and we do plan on tagging songs soon enough), tagging the comments build a much more solid system about what the song may be about. 

Head on over to a lyric page while you’re logged in.  Towards the bottom right of each comment and next to ‘Post Reply’ you will see a link to ‘Add Tag’.  Easy enough.

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October

Posted on October 4, 2011 by mike

Can you believe it?  October is upon us.  Unreal.  Where did 2011 go?  Brian and I always like to say that this year (yyyy) is going to be THE year.  What THE really means, I’m not sure, but for us it has always been a way to encourage us to look towards the future. 

Did we do much in 2011?  Yes, but I don’t think we did enough.  Was it a good year?  Yes, absolutely.  Could it have been better?  Same answer:  yes, absolutely. 

We accomplished one thing we wanted: being licensed.  Sure, we had to disable copy+paste (which annoys the hell out of me), but it means we’re legal.  It means we can sleep easier at night.  I know you, the end-user, is probably saying, “who the fuck cares if you’re legal!” but it should mean a lot to you.  It means we can still operate. 

But another thing we’re getting set to accomplish is improving the content.  We have a TON of content.  You know this, I know this.  However, we’ve been slacking.  We always assumed you, the end-user, would sort through the content to get what you wanted.  This works, sure, but not enough.  We all want instant gratification and because of this, we know we can improve.   Tagging.

Yes, it’s been done before.  Nothing revolutionary, I know.  But tagging works; especially on a large data-set. 

The moderating team began heavily tagging our comments a few months ago — which means soon you’ll be able to search by X and get all comments that are based around such.   Again, not revolutionary, but having such metadata allows us some special functionality (I’ll talk about that at a later time).   I have also started the functionality to allow you to tag comments on your own. 

That’s all I have for today.  Until next time, uhh.. ciao.

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Finding Lyrics

Posted on September 19, 2011 by mike

I didn’t think we’d ever get here – ok, I knew we would, but it took us forever – but we’re now offering a legal and licensed lyric database. This comes after months and months of talking, debating and negotiating. Our goal was to get to this point, but with the both of us having full time jobs outside of SongMeanings, it’s been incredibly hard.  I’m sure the group of guys we signed with were ready to throw-down a few times due to how long it took for us to sign. 

But, this is all behind us now as we move into a new era of SM.

So some of the details around the licensing? There are three players in the game and we had long discussions time and time again with each. They all offer essentially the same database (though they would all probably argue differently and rightfully so as one of the players was still wrapping up its database). For us, it came down to track-record, durability and confidence. This is why we decided to sign with LyricFind to provide licensed lyrics for the SongMeanings community. LyricFind has shown they’re the market leader and will continue to be such.

We began implementing their services these last few weeks and finally pushed out some new code late last night. This first release is strictly mapping our existing content to their database. In the next few weeks, we’ll be working on expanding our database to include everything LyricFind has to offer – I believe an additional million lyrics or so – which is, well, awesome.

To summarize, SongMeanings is now supporting fully legal and licensed lyrics.

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SF MusicTech Summit Follow Up

Posted on May 11, 2011 by brian

The 8th annual (and our first!) SF MusicTech Summit has come and gone and boy what a great event. I can’t begin to explain the energy or the exhaustion all of it caused (how’s that for a conundrum?). This is absolutely good though, because the exhaustion was a side-effect of all the great people and startups/companies we talked to. Ideas were flying around everywhere, from the demos we saw, to the panels we listened in on, and the pitches we heard. I’m sure the Sapporos added to it a bit, too.

Attending this year further solidified our belief that we’re in a great industry, fueled by brilliant people. We’re excited to be a part of it and can’t wait to expand and start building great new offerings to continue to set us apart. We learned so much in the couple days we were out there and have a laundry list of ideas to hash out and new folks to reach out to. As Mike mentioned in his first post, 2011 is looking bright.

A big thanks to Brian Zisk for putting the conference together and all of the great speakers and attendees. We’re looking forward to seeing you at the next one!

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