Song lyrics sites are universally terrible. They are a usability nightmare, with bad markup and tons of ads. Here are some examples:
The markup is bad, there are ads everywhere, and the usability generally sucks. Why? I understand that running such a site exposes you to legal risk, and I’ve always assumed that the outlaw foundation of such sites explains their awfulness. Even so, I’m wondering how difficult it would be to make a better attempt.
Any high quality site in this vein has to have some form of revenue, because it will attract a lot of traffic. The secret is to spend as little as possible on infrastructure. The other day, the NPR News Apps Blog had a post about building a high capacity, low cost site. That seems like a good starting point.
The other requirement is a big catalog of songs, organized by artist and album, and then the lyrics for all of them. I think building such a database with absolutely minimal human intervention would be fun.
Right now I’m just kicking this idea around. If I start working on it, I’ll post about my progress.