I’m a big fan of things that don’t suck horribly. Sometimes I like to look up song lyrics on the Internet. And there are no sites that I’m a fan of, if you catch my drift…

There are a handful of lyrics sites that always rank highly on Google. But I’d say that 98% of the time, the lyrics contain egregious errors. They completely mishear a line (often in ways that just common sense can show is wrong), or have glaring misspellings, or just typos. And terrible formatting. Always.

I don’t get how a whole industry can be crappy, but that’s beside the point.

There’s a site called WikiLyrics. At one time the founder commented on a blog from years ago when I called for such a service. But the site is pretty hard to navigate, and looks too much like a wiki.

SongMeanings is the site I like most. The lyrics are usually spot-on. And, best of all, you can post comments on the ‘meaning’ of a song. But they have odd uptime problems, where the site will be down for days at a time. I haven’t been able to get to it for several days now.

If I had a lot of money, I’d buy out the handful of companies that always rank highly on Google for song lyric searches, along with Song Meanings, and develop one site to rule them all. Registered users could edit the lyrics, with some oversight. (My intuition says that music-related stuff is much more prone to vandalism.)

Rather than a bajillion obnoxious ads, we’d have a couple tasteful ads. Ideally, it would be more specific links: buy the song from a vendor who pays me a cut of every sale, and buy band merchandise with a similar arrangement. You could also try to work out something with concert tickets.

Work on setting up 30-second samples of the song. It is my understanding that 30 seconds counts as fair use.

Let people leave comments, but have Digg-style ‘voting.’ (Plus active moderators.) People can leave comments. The stupid ones get moderated down, the really stupid ones get deleted, but the good, insightful ones show up on top. The ones that say, “This song is about…”

And, most importantly, you need a nice clean, easy-to-use UI. Every single lyrics site gets this wrong. I don’t want to go through categories. I don’t want to have to specify whether it’s a song or an artist. I want to type in something and get it. I don’t want the lyrics to be in a 300-pixel wide frame that’s flanked by ads and other useless crap.

You can develop this on your own, but buying some other lyrics sites gives you steady traffic, high link rankings, and an established set of lyrics, however pathetic they may be. And, by buying them out, you ensure that the Internet has one less terrible website.

You are free to steal and use this idea. In fact, you are encouraged to steal and use this idea.