Owner Wikia Website lyrics.wikia.com | Created by Sean Colombo | |
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Type of site Internet lyrics database Available in Multilingual (13 active Main Page translations) Alexa rank 7,919,632 (December 2013) | ||
LyricWikia is an online wiki-based lyrics database and encyclopedia. In March 2013, it was the seventh largest MediaWiki installation with over 1,800,000 content pages including 1.5 million songs. Users on the site can view, edit, and discuss the lyrics of songs, which are also available for purchase from links on the site. The site is searchable by song, artist, album, genre, hometown, label, and language. Users are told to be mindful of copyright while contributing, and copyright violations are removed upon request. All the lyrics on LyricWikia are licensed through LyricFind.
Contents
History
The site was released in April 2006 by Sean Colombo while a student at Rochester Institute of Technology and soon after won the DreamHost Site of the Month award for April 2006 which helped jump-start its growth since winners of the contest are announced in DreamHost's monthly newsletter which claims to have over 50,000 subscribers.
Motive Force LLC, the parent company of LyricWikia, was the target of a lawsuit brought forth against it by the National Music Publishers Association. As a result, the site has migrated to Wikia, which has a blanket licensing arrangement with Gracenote to provide lyrics, and blocked access to full lyrics via API.
Since then LyricWiki has switched to LyricFind as their lyric licensor, and has been renamed to LyricWikia
Application programming interface and apps
The site allowed programmatic access to the contents of its database through a web API. Following a 2009 agreement with licensors, queried lyrics may be displayed partially with a link to their respective web page. This API has been leveraged to create plugins for many media players including Winamp, Amarok, Windows Media Player, iTunes, musikCube, foobar2000, ITunes via Mac OS X Dashboard, and more. LyricWikia has also released a Facebook application called "LyricWiki Challenge" which is a social, competitive game based on identifying lyrics from popular songs in several genres. Though, since early 2016, API has been discontinued due to licensing restrictions.
Wikia, has also developed a mobile app called Lyrically that utilizes the lyric-database of LyricWikia and displays lyrics based on the song being played.