In 1997, an Internet server that contained thousands of song lyrics was shut down by the music industry. Lyrics.ch was an easy to use, well laid out site that let you find or submit lyrics for songs. Like Napster, it was all user driven, but had one important distinction, the lyrics were kept on a central repository. The music industry decided with it's usual heavy hand, that people connecting to this site were in essence, stealing the artists work, and thus their royalties. Citing nebulous instances of people using the lyrics for profit in clubs, Karaoke clubs, garage bands, etc, the server was closed off, then later reopened with only lyrics that were approved for distribution by the record companies. At last look, it was permanently offline.

Now, who hasn't listened to the radio, or even you own cd, and not been able to understand parts of the song? You, me, just about everyone. What if you listen to foreign music? It's many times harder to gain understaning of the song if you don't speak that language. Maybe you listen to thrash metal, rap, or opera. All music with lyrics that are harder to understand than average run of the mill pop. Lyrics.ch was a wonderful place to go find out what the lyrics were, and hence, what the artists meant when they wrote the song.

Reading the poetry that is a song gives you a whole new insight to the song, not just hearing it, with the accompanying beat and instruments. It lets you understand, in a completely different medium, what the song is about. Songs may have a music style that you don't normally like, or one that puts you into a mood that, when reading the poetry, the lines of the songs on paper (or e-form) that you otherwise would not see.

Songs with a more complicated meaning were more easily understood, the insight of the artists meaning taken to heart. On the same note, banal songs, current top-40 hits were laid out for their lack of creativity, their lack of meaning, exposing them for what they really are: catchy tunes, like nursery rhymes.

So what was really the RIAA's intent by shutting lyrics.ch and many of the other sites like it down? To really understand it, we probably need to look at it at level of morals.

If we take the industry's comments at face level, that they are looking out for the artists' best interests, so that they can continue to make money, it seems pretty plausible. You wouldn't want to not be reimbursed for people doing knock off copies of your songs, as became prevelant in the late 80s with the hip-hop movement, stealing riffs from other artists. Or maybe Karaoke bars were stealing the lyrics in make money at their bars.

Ok, the stealing of musical pieces was never really decided, but the lyrics themselves are broadcast out on the air daily. You and I are free to record them as we see fit, and listen to them as many times as we like. Do we? Sure. Blank tapes still do a good business, even with CD-R's being so commonplace nowdays.

Are Karaoke bars making money off knowing the lyrics? Probably. But that style of bar is a regional fad, limited to the midwest, and not even that popular there. Kind of like O2 bars it'll go away, like yesterdays fashions.

How about those garage bands? They do cover songs in bars, and they certainly make money off of them, in addition to playing their own music. Yet small bands have covered others music for decades. It's a way to show the audience how they can both do their own music, and the cover songs act almost as a filler. Most small bands don't have an entire repitore of music to choose from, so they choose some hits. How many bands have ever played Led Zepplins 'Stairway to Heaven' as a cover tune is impossible to count, but how many of those who made it big, and now have their own music still continue to cover that same song is essentially nil. Covering helps them make it big, and once they're there, they don't need to anymore.

Using that logic, that one cannot emulate ones influences would render just about any sort of artistic activity moot. Who has written anything without using a style of some author or authors in their past? What poet hasn't read poetry that they fell in love with, and tried their own version of it?

So what does the RIAA do to all of us by forcing these small private concerns (not even usually compaies, just private individuals who like to collect song lyrics out of some sort of selfless service) to close down?? It doesn't help the artists, it doesn't help the fan base, it doesn't help any of us. It doesn't line the RIAA's pockets, how can it? It's not an item, or music itself like MP3s are.

It's merely control. Like so many people in the world, a group of people who have power over a certain industry or thing, like to keep that control. They only see it as a step to removing themselves as the arbitrary head of the industry, to be replaced by no one knows who or what, if anything, and it scares them.

So we all lose. It's back to what it used to be, with lyrics of hard to understand songs remaining that way. Searching for lyrics will be difficult, awkward, with no repositorys being widely available, lest they get shut down also.

The internet provides a medium of freedom for everything, for communication, for information, for the smallest of things to be known to the world. Letting things like this happen isn't hurtful in the short run, the site wasn't a portal use by hundreds of millions of people, but it's indicitive of a trend. A trend to control the information, to control what *you* want to know.

We say goodbye to lyrics.ch, as we say goodbye to Napster. Britney Spears and whomever is next years replacement for her will continue to bring in the money for the industry labels, but the small artists now have it harder. It'll be harder for you too, to find them, but try, it's the only way to keep your variety. Don't let the RIAA keep winning.