LyricWiki

» see lyrics.fandom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

for a few years, if you searched an english song lyric, you landed on lyricwiki about half the time. i did, from ankara, on ttnet broadband, without once thinking about what the site was or who kept it running. that was sort of the whole point of it, a page that answered the question and asked nothing back.

lyricwiki started on april 6 2006, made by a rochester institute of technology student named sean colombo. it ran on mediawiki, the same engine wikipedia uses, pointed at collecting the lyrics to every song people were willing to type in. by 2013 it held more than a million and a half songs and was one of the biggest mediawiki installations on earth.

the problem was always the law. lyrics are copyrighted, and a wiki full of them is a lawsuit waiting for a plaintiff. the national music publishers association came after the parent company, and lyricwiki moved onto wikia, later renamed fandom, which had a licensing deal with gracenote that made the whole thing arguably legal. i never contributed a line to it. i was a reader, one of the millions who arrived from a search result, copied what i needed, and left. that is how most of these crowd-built reference sites actually lived, a few thousand people typing and a few hundred million people reading.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the postmortem ~

fandom is built to be family-friendly, and a database of every lyric ever written is not that. in april 2019 they closed lyricwiki to editing over lyrics and images they called too explicit for the network. then on september 21 2020 they shut it down completely, citing license costs that had climbed year over year against a return that never really showed up.

~ what got buried with it ~

for a while there was supposed to be no data dump at all, then a partial one appeared on the closed-wiki page. either way, a decade and a half of volunteer transcription and translation mostly evaporated into archive links. the words survived somewhere, but the place that held them stopped existing.

~ the long tail ~

the lyrics did not disappear from the web, they scattered. genius and a dozen ad-choked clones absorbed the traffic. but the specific thing lyricwiki had, one open editable place where a song's words were treated like an entry worth getting right, did not really come back.

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