Interview With CEO Of LyricFind: On Their New API System And The Most Innovative Lyric Sites

This is part two of my interview with Darryl Ballantyne. He's CEO of LyricFind, a legal lyric solution provider. In part two of this interview with Ballantyne, he talks about recent developments at his company and the challenges of disrupting lyric pirates.

Hypebot: What are some of the most interesting lyric websites that you've seen emerge lately?

Darryl Ballantyne: We’re seeing a lot of great lyrics-based concepts recently; the unfortunate part is I can’t talk about most of them yet! LyricFind partners Shazam and Bing come to mind. Shazam is a great implementation because it’s immediately there when you’re discovering a song; you can tag it and get to know the song much more deeply by immediately viewing the lyrics. Bing is another great one because it gets you right at the search point – you can skip the minefield of unlicensed sites online, and stay on Bing.com, who you trust.

With lyrics sites directly, I’m a big fan off kissthisguy.com, where they list popular misheard lyrics – it’s not just informative, but pretty funny, too. Other sites try to delve into the meaning of the songs, which is pretty cool and informative as well; for example, most people don’t realize that “Every Breath You Take” by The Police is actually meant to be a creepy stalker song, and not a love song – so don’t sing it to a girl you’re chasing!

Hypebot: As more lyric websites are founded, are competitors starting to innovate more now?

Darryl Ballantyne: Definitely. We’re starting to see lyrics websites integrate additional features like videos, news, discussion forums, photos, album art, and more. There is so much lyrics traffic online now (billions of pageviews per month), that sites are trying to stand out from the crowd as much as they can to attract that traffic, and keep users coming back directly to their site– rather than relying on where they place in search results.

Hypebot: How has your new API system enabled partners to more easy use your lyrics?

Darryl Ballantyne: The new suite of APIs in Web Services v2.0 makes integration much, much easier for our clients. Clients can retrieve lyrics based on a number of different identifiers now, including Rovi, AMG, and Muze IDs, ISRC, artist/songname, and even custom solutions for other ID systems. We’ve also built in robot filtering, to separate search engine bot traffic, charts (which give clients the Top 25 lyrics on the LyricFind system to build into their content offering), artist and album level data, increased search functionality to help “Name That Tune” based on the lyrics, and more. And all the APIs work seamlessly with one another to make integration incredibly easy.

Hypebot: Since sex and lyrics are so popular in searches, should we make websites with both?

Darryl Ballantyne: Most lyrics are about sex, so I think we have already!