Lyric websites have been a staple of music-related search results since the start of the millenium, but the format of presenting lyrics on many of these sites has remained mainly the same since their inception: plain text with no supplementary information or interactivity. Perhaps the most notable innovator in the genre is Genius — formerly known as Rap Genius, the site’s sidebar annotations now extend to multiple genres and even outside the music sphere to news and entertainment, and infrastructure to help “annotate any page on the Internet” is currently in beta. Google recently began showing lyrics in their search result pages as part of their Knowledge Graph, but beyond requiring a click through to the song available for purchase in their Google Play store for access to the full lyrics, their method of displaying lyrics is no more advanced. Even despite sidebar-comment approaches similar to Genius in other industries, including notes on content platform Medium and annotations on Quartz articles, most lyrics-dedicated sites have been stagnant and unimaginative.

Continue reading “Using Livefyre Sidenotes to make lyrics more interactive”

Next week, Phoenix will rise from the ashes…with new music.

After reaching new levels of success with “1901” and “Lisztomania” from their fourth album, 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, the rock quartet from Versailles, France has spent the past two years working on its followup. Earlier this week, the band announced that Bankrupt! would be released during the week of April 22 by Glassnote Records and the band’s imprint, Loyauté, with an international release from V2 Records. The announcement of the album’s release date was accompanied with the album cover, its tracklist, and a short text-based video featuring audio from the track “Bourgeois.”

Continue reading “Phoenix to release Bankrupt! lead single “Entertainment” on Monday”