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

Posted in SongMeanings | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

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.

Posted in Comments, Tagging | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in New Feature, Tagging, To-Do | Leave a comment

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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SF MusicTech Summit

Posted on March 9, 2011 by mike

March?  What the hell happened to February?  Where is time going?  Man, I’m getting old.  Good thing I’m not cranky yet. 

In other news, we’re excited to be attending SF MusicTech this year on May 9th.  It brings together many great music/technology individuals and companies such as musiXmatch, Slacker and SongKick to name a few. 

2011 is looking bright.

Posted in Conferences | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

User Searching

Posted on February 15, 2011 by mike

We’ve made it easier to search for users on SongMeanings.  Previously you had to do some trickery to get around to finding other users, but this is no more.  On the drop down in our search box is a selection for Users.  Simple as that.  It’s quick and easy.  Plus, there is a link to send the user a private message in the search results.

Additionally, on a users profile, we added a tab at the top to send the user a private message.  Another much needed improvement.

I’ve been debating with myself on the use of ‘Friends’ on SongMeanings.  I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, we’re not Facebook.  But there is a social aspect to music that needs to be established more on SongMeanings.  Maybe it’s friends in the sense that there is a connection between user X and user Y but that’s it.  I think with the addition of ‘Friends,’ we can build some great features for suggestions and linking up between users.  But again, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

What are your thoughts?

Posted in New Feature, Searching | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

SMX2 – Artist Pages

Posted on February 5, 2011 by mike

Below is the look I’ve been going with for the new design.  I feel it holds true to the original look and feel of SongMeanings.  There’s no orange in this mock up, but I *may* throw it back in there somewhere.  I haven’t totally decided yet.

Feel free to check out the mock up and please feel free to reply with your questions, comments and what not.  I ask that you provide constructive criticism.  Lets be mature about this, cool?

Also, I know this looks like quite a few advertisements, but there is a good chance that they won’t make it into the final cut.  Or they’ll only make it into the final cut for users who are not logged in.

Posted in Design, SongMeanings | Tagged , , | 31 Comments

Moving Away From Orange

Posted on February 2, 2011 by mike

I previously discussed a new design for SongMeanings.  I’d like to be a bit clear on this as typically design changes can be huge milestones for websites — both positive and negative.  This will be more of a “freshening up” of SongMeanings than an all out new design implementation.  The “look” and “feel” of SongMeanings will remain in place.  Navigation, for the most part, will remain the same.  Any navigational changes will be for the better — for instance, how you navigate to an artists will improve.

But after discussing a design “refresh” with Brian and looking at a few design mock-ups, we both came to the conclusion that the orange needs to be phased out.  I think it has served it’s time and we are ready to move on.  The blue will remain in place.  Again, we don’t want to be too bold in our changes.  And plus, if we make the blue darker, we’re heading into Facebook territory.  If we go lighter, we’re heading towards twitter.

So what do you all think?  Would you be OK with a SongMeanings world without the orange?

Well, to be honest, the orange and blue will still be there.  It’ll just be an alternative theme you can switch to.

Posted in Design | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments