For a "fun side project" I wasn't willing to accept that risk.
http://subimage.com/blog/2012/12/15/lyricful-looking-for-inv...
There are a couple of routes to go legal - one being Musixmatch, which charges at minimum $20k per year for a blanket license.
An email straight from them:
"We offer data licensing packages, through our scalable Lyrics API, that are customized to meet your needs with annual fees ranging from USD $20,000 to higher depending on the audience for the data and which data are being licensed. We are not able to offer any sort of data license for less than USD $20,000."
It's not super clear to me how someone like Rap Genius is getting around this. Their policy page says they respect DMCA requests, but if they are unlicensed, they would get a DMCA request for every single page on their site. So my guess is some kind of blanket license to someone like the Harry Fox Agency. They have the money for it.
By the looks of it, Lyricful deserved better. Hopefully someone with deeper pockets can bring it back.
Red Ocean Strategy is a highly competitive market space, and what Lyricful were engaged in.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy [2]http://summonthewarrior.com/
Ads, but tastefully done I think. Definitely not any popups, no Google Adwords, etc.
