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by yoodit 4319 days ago
OK, so here goes:

1. The site is DMCA compliant 2. Lyrics are provided legally through musixmatch 3. Chords as they are presented on the site are legal. We spent a lot of time and money making sure of that.

Yes, the TOS should be updated which I will take care ASAP.

1 comments

I agree that the site is DMCA compliant, you've covered that. lyrics added by the users for tracks that musixmatch hasn't got the rights to will probably still be a problem. the chords are, I guess, no problem, as you can't copyright a chord progression.

the big problem however is the embedding of material from soundcloud and youtube. while strictly speaking it might be legal, the total experience of your site is severely impacted by the fact that youtube continually removes video's that violate _their_ TOS, leaving orphaned tabs. or, as I myself noticed, blocks embedding of most tracks (at least for me, there's probably some geo-blocking going on).

I really like the interface, I'm very impressed with how well it works for most tracks (and fast too), but by making it dependent on difficult external parties like youtube and soundcloud I don't see it taking off. I've had very similar usability problems with all other projects that attempt similar things.

edit : I'll check back for the updated TOS later. I'm curious what they'll say...

Thanks for the insight. I agree that a 3rd party media provider such as YouTube & SoundCloud has it potential for problems. It's not a perfect solution I agree. I have been toying with re-attaching tabs to different audio sources when a video dies for example. I'm not entirely happy with current results. It should be automatic, which I have a pretty good idea on how to do, but haven't gotten around to implementing yet.
I just checked the competition, they still suffer the same problems you're facing : most videos simply won't load, a lot because they can only be viewed on youtube, some are blocked (for me at least), some are gone.

I guess society isn't ready yet.