I'm resubmitting my article here, because a HN editor thought it would be great to change the URL & Title of my original submission after it got over 40 upvotes / 20 comments:
That's exactly what I did, and they changed the link and modified the discussion!
Notice, people below were talking about RapGenius specifically, their VC, and how much a license costs - yet that stopped once the editors modified the URL & headline.
It's not "blogspam" - it gave a nod to the place I saw it originally, while providing a unique perspective on the subject because of my experience.
1 - The Pitchfork article didn't mention any numbers relating to what the license cost.
2 - I gave context into who David Lowery is
3 - The headline included RapGenius, which most people find news on interesting
That information was provided by me, after discussions with song publishers & research. Changing the title & URL is extremely disrespectful.
RE: "we have enough of these photo sharing gimmicks already"
RE: "I think the author is missing the opportunity cost here"
The fact that there's already entrenched photo sharing kings means that you don't have to be first to market, overspend, or rush. There's no time crunch here, meaning that a great product could have been built well - over time - on budget, and still have had success.
Did you even read the article? The photo storage / sharing / librarian market is HUGE. Definitely large enough to support multiple players, even marginal ones that make $3-400k/yr.
Snapchat also hasn't proven it can generate a single real-world dollar from end users or advertisers.
They could implement advertising, fuck the entire service up, and all the teens jump ship to the next app that allows you to easily import all your contacts.
There's no "lock in" with social networks like Snapchat. Want proof? Friendster, Myspace, etc.
The main theme I was trying to get across is that it's more realistic to build a profitable business, instead of throwing efforts towards eyeballs, vc-cash, and a lottery ticket chance of cashing out.
We didn't see a problem with it (and neither did our lawyers) until that $6.6M judgement played out against another lyric site with similar "user contributed" content.
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 was impossible to afford licenses for the lyrics our site contained. You can go two ways...fly illegally (which most of these sites do) and risk getting sued, or pay an outrageous copyright fee yearly to license tracks for display.
For a "fun side project" I wasn't willing to accept that risk.