It’s been far too long since my last “eat my ass” post. The time has come.
The target of my ire today: Lyrics web sites.
You ever search the internet for the lyrics to some song you’ve been listening to? Prepare to go on a wild ride of pop-up advertising, blinking things, moving things, popping windows and so forth. It almost makes “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” at Disneyland feel like a moment of zen-like tranquility.
Grrrrr!
All I want is the damn lyrics. Can have please? I do not want any of your damn filthy ring tones you damn dirty apes. I’m quite proud of the fact that my phone can’t even handle ring tones. Hell yeah, one of my small victories in life. No ring tones for me. Like I have time to hear “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-A-Lot every time someone reaches out and activates this infernal contraption against my will.
I enjoy looking up lyrics. Sometimes you just can’t understand those crazy kids and the way they enunciate when singing these days. But I can’t stand all the steaming crap found on the lyrics sites, and there are tons of these sites, all using similar crap. Apparently song lyrics is a very competitive niche.
So I use a little trick courtesy of Google.
- Search for the song title and add the word “lyrics.” This brings up a list of results that might even have what I want. Sometimes.
- Click the “cached” link provided by Google to look at an archived copy of the page and not the live page itself. I do this in an attempt to avoid all the advertising crap.
- Use my browser’s “view source” function on that cached page (since the crap can still happen).
- Close the original page as fast as possible.
- I’m now look through that source code for the content I want. All I have to do now is scroll down and find the lyrics. Victory!
I did that this morning and found a little something that looked like this where the lyrics were supposed to be:
He was 
a hard-
headed m
Those puss-filled bags of bastards! They went and scrambled the alphabetic characters within their raw file using HTML entities. That makes it not very readable by humans, eh?
At this point I was hating the lyrics web site pretty damn bad. I’ll be damned before I click anything on their site as long as I can still draw breath.
These lyrics web sites have got to be more overly-protective of their content than anyone I’ve ever seen. And here’s the kicker…
They don’t even own their fucking content. They are a bunch of copyright thieves, stealing lyrics they don’t own and hosting them on their sites to make a profit. And being dickheads about it.
Now you know. Just thought I’d share what I learned about these puss bags.
Shouts from the Abyss 
Hey, you. I can’t stand that either – – the blinking lights, pop ups, insanely bright backgrounds. I find AZ Lyrics usually has what I need, and I dont’ think I’ve ever had pop ups and such.
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So many shitty lyric websites!!! I also hate when they have words posted as lyrics which are clearly not correct.
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Unagirl, the cell phone ringtone advertisement is usually a popup window with a special place where you are supposed to click to “close” the window. I don’t trust those, though. I suspect that sometimes they make something that appears to be a “close” link but what it actually does is suck you in deeper. So I find some other way to back out without actually clicking their “close” button. This just happened to me again this morning. Next time I’ll try AZ. That’s for the recommendation.
Ashley, you’re right, of course. By ripping content they don’t own, they often get lyrics wrong. In fact, a lot of the time these sites could be more accurately be described as Misheard Lyrics web sites. Some of their errors are downright ribald! 🙂
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