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”

I developed a personal website to discuss my interests in music, web development, and social media using WordPress, creating a custom theme focused on responsive design and clean typography. I included a custom post type for Reviews, as well as custom taxonomies for Artists and Record Labels that extend across the various types of content on the site. Original written content resulted in 16,000 pageviews during the first year of operation.

Built using the Less theme by Jared Erickson as a base.