Music Corporations stymying innovation yet again. Lyrical gets screwed.

We introduced you guys to a new application a couple of days ago that I’ve grown to love over the last couple of weeks, now it’s toast.  Lyrical, an iPhone application, would retrieve the lyrics for the songs that were playing on your iPhone or Touch by connecting to LyricWiki, grabbing the song’s information, then displaying the lyrics right on your screen.  It helped me decipher what the hell Mick Jagger was saying in I Just Want To See His Face, something I commended it for, a lot!

Well, now that’s all gone to crap, because the NMPA is still clueless.  LyricWiki is becoming an “legitimately licensed site”, that the corporate’s at the record labels are allowing to put up lyrics.  This isn’t necessarily bad.  It’s great for LyricWiki and we’re happy for them, but what really blows is that the NMPA companies “will NOT allow is ANY third party access to the lyrics (even if they are user generated)”.  So, this mean’s an innovative application for the iPhone can’t continue to provide an awesome service.  Man, do I feel terrible for the guys over at Clink Apps (Lyrical Dev’s), the got limited notice and had minutes to pull their application before the App would stop working.

They’re currently looking into other avenues for getting their application back up and running again, but they’re unsure when it’ll happen.
We can’t even start a count down timer for an NMPA sanctioned LyricWiki application because the record labels won’t even allow that.

What a shame.

[quotes from email conversation with Max at Clink Apps; image via eastscene]