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”

Below an unchanged top ten, Taylor Swift slides into the top twenty as “Out Of The Woods” moves up one spot for the fourth week in a row. Delta Rae’s “Scared,” the week’s biggest mover, jumps 98-30 in its second week. Meanwhile, they also chart two re-entries as the chart’s two highest entrants: “Run” (#74) and “Chasing Twisters” (#83) both reappear for the first time in just over a year thanks to new recordings for the band’s upcoming sophomore album, After It All. Included in the week’s eight debuts are tracks from Imagine Dragons, Nate Ruess, and vōx. Justin Mauriello also scores a re-entry with “Forgotten” at a new peak of #87.

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Walk The Moon notches a second week at #1 with “Shut Up And Dance,” while Ellie Goulding moves into the top three with “Love Me Like You Do.” Two songs also enter the top ten: Taylor Swift’s “Style” moves 11-5 and Tori Kelly’s “Nobody Love” climbs 25-9 in its second week. Fancy makes a big thirty-position jump to #23 with “Goodbye,” dwarfed only by Max Frost’s jump of 34 positions as “Let Me Down Easy” leaps to #60. Emily Hearn makes the week’s highest debut, with “Volcano” exploding in at #36. Additional new entrants are Imagine Dragons, COIN, Tor Miller, Leon Bridges, Youth Club, and Mikky Ekko.

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The GRAMMY Awards are often described as Music’s Biggest Night. While the awards ceremony typically lives up to the moniker with star-studded performances and gramophone trophies for hundreds of artists across many genres each year, iTunes charts also show how music sales are impacted, providing the year’s first prominent sales increase following the post-Christmas bump fueled by gift card redemptions. Many of the songs featured during the 56th GRAMMY Awards broadcast on January 26 received significant jumps on the iTunes song chart throughout and following the show, and numerous songs heard in its music-centric commercials felt the benefit of exposure as well. The statistics below reflect positions on the US iTunes chart of about 1500 songs, tracked from the beginning of the broadcast in the Eastern time zone at 8:00pm to the end of the Western time zone broadcast at 2:40am Eastern. Continue reading “iTunes sales surge for Daft Punk, John Legend, and more following the 56th GRAMMY Awards”