kolomona / lyrics

:page_facing_up: Open Lyrics Database

Lyrics

Here you can read and contribute lyrics to your favorite songs.

Q&A

So this is yet another lyrics website?

Not really. Think of it as a fansourced tribute to music with words.
Nothing but lyrics submitted by you and other github users, all in one place, free to access by anyone, at any time.
The end-goal is to eventually turn it into a one big point of reference for all other lyrics resources on the net.

How did it start?

This project is a response to the sad fact that the quality of the vast majority of lyrics on the Internet leaves something to be desired.

What makes you think your database is not going to end up being as bad as all the others?

Git. It lets many awesome people with various music tastes contribute and correct texts for their favorite songs.
Also nobody is getting paid here for it, it's a hobby project driven entirely by admiration of music and poetry.
Lyrics websites are mostly being maintained by a handful of people, and they tend to strive toward quantity rather than quality (more content means higher positions within search engines, hence bigger ad revenue). Here we plan to have lots and lots of contributors from all over the world, which should result in the most multilingual lyrics database on the Internet.

You're just copying lyrics from other websites because you don't know how to code!

No, not exactly. See, many great but not mainstream artists have no lyrics available online. Zilch.
Unless their texts are easy to write out, we get in touch with those artists and ask to share the lyrics from the original source.

So what's the plan?

Currently we're trying to accumulate as many lyrics as no other publicly available database has. It's easier than it sounds since we already have a few dozen unique texts in the database, and putting together a scraper to pull lyrics from other big resources is not a problem. We don't do that though, mostly because that would make the quality of the database suffer, so currently we are trying to get more responsible maintainers involved.

This project is a waste of time, nothing's going to work.

Negative thinking won't get you anywhere in life. The big advantage of this project is that you can save the whole database to your disk in two clicks, while other websites can go offline at any time with all their lyrics becoming inaccessible to the public. That alone makes every contribution to this repository a solid and permanent improvement for the Internet as a whole.

Other websites will just take lyrics from here and never thank you for your hard work.

Will speak for myself and say that contributing to this project never feels like work. I can also guarantee that both fans and artists who would ever contribute to this database will do so as a gesture of good will. The goal is to improve the quality of lyrics available on the Internet, therefore we'd be happy to know that other websites are sourcing lyrics from this database as long as they retain the artists' credits.

Are you planning to have a web interface for this database at some point?

Yes. As a matter of fact, we already do. No ads, no ugly miniscule pixelated fonts, no clipboard injections, no malware or heart-breaking censorship. GitHub itself can serve as a good search platform for the database. Cloning the repository to your filesystem and browsing it the old-fashioned way is another option.

How can I help?

Please feel free to fork, add to, correct, suggest a feature or make a request for certain content to be added.

Do you censor things in here?

No.

References

• Instructions for contributing

Legal

All copyrights and credits to lyrics taken from official sources belong to their respective authors and legal owners.