Published July 27th, 2006 by hrabbach
A little bit of history
Those of you who have been coming to this site regularly and waiting for it to launch as a christian lyrics search site may be wondering why it has now launched as a blog instead. I thought that I owe you a bit of an explanation and it’s probably best done by having a look at the history of ccmlyrics.com.
Some years ago, it must have been around the year 2000, some friends and I were running a christian website in German (it’s still around, but hasn’t been updated for two years). We were thinking about new features to add to the site and a lyrics search engine sounded like something that we couldn’t find (at least for CCM lyrics) on the internet yet. So the initial idea was to start something like that as part of the existing website. A while later, the ccmlyrics.com domain was for sale and just for fun, we put a very low offer in and to our surprise it was accepted and we even got ccmlyrics.org and ccmlyrics.net with it as well. That’s when we decided that we were going to turn this into a separate project, also because it had a much wider potential audience than a german website.
My friend Tobi and I started developing the backend technology in 2001 (he’s also the one who did the initial design of this site and I hope I can convince him to update it later this year). It took us about a year to get the search part close to where we wanted it to be. At that point, it was able to do a full text search on all the lyrics in our database (we had added about 1000 songs as test data), fuzzy match even misspelled words, assign a statistical rank to the results and make suggestions similar to Google’s “are you searching for xyz?” feature. It was also reasonably fast and we were ready and willing to add more lyrics to our database, in preparation for a possible launch later that year. In the meantime, I had moved to the UK for two years, so all our work and communication was via email, whereas in the past we had actually been in the same city… that sure slowed us down a bit.
Anyway, as we were getting closer to the launch and started signing up volunteers who were doing data entry, we suddenly realized that we had never really looked at the legal implications of running such a website. Until then we had assumed that while MP3 files and even chords were a clear no-go area, lyrics were a bit of a grey area where we could get away with publishing them on our site as long as we didn’t make any money. But just about that time a few lyrics collections on the net started receiving friendly letters from lawyers, asking them to take certain lyrics down, so we looked into the issue a bit more and came to the conclusion that the only safe way to be able to do what we were about to do was to properly license all the lyrics we wanted to publish. Since we had no intention of making any money with the site, we had no budget for licensing and all our enquiries about free licenses remained unanswered. We still believe that christian artists with a message should have an interest in having their lyrics widely distributed, but unfortunately most of them are bound by contracts with record companies, publishers and other entities who often have different interests. So while we were waiting, still hoping for a solution to this problem, maybe a corporate sponsorship, we slowly became busy with other things…
…and that’s pretty much where we were at for a long time. Earlier this year I decided that as I was paying registration fees for all those domains, I might as well do something with them. The idea for a blog was born, where I and possibly others as well could write about lyrics that have something to say. It took quite a while for it to actually happen, but here it is. I hope you enjoy this as much as you would have enjoyed the original idea. Please come back here or subscribe to our feeds or email updates and tell your friends about this site as well. Thank you for your patience, sorry if this is not what you hoped for it to be. I hope it will still bless you in unexpected ways.
