alt Hacker NewsPeople want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
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In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there.
Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
> And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason
And others feel they are entitled to passive income by hastily throwing together IP they did not create and do not own, apparently.
Everything has to be a side hustle and everyone has to take their cut as a middleman these days.
There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site.
Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
> for some reason
Jeez, man. This is just sad.
You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music.
Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads.
Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
Why not? People will post apologia on behalf of ad corporations on the Internet, that too for free.
There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them
You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time.
We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff.
And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model.
Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing.
If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.