new maintainer?

[JosiahParry]

@antaldaniel if you would like to take over this package i'd be happy to migrate it.

I am no longer interested in fixing and maintaining. This package is a webscraper so it sits in a grey space legally.

To fix this package one would need to fix genius_url() as that is the workhorse that does the lyrics scraping. genius_tracklist() works still—I've checked.

To improve this package it should be migrated to httr2 and use multi_req_perform() for add_genius(), genius_album(), genius_tracklist() etc. It would speed it up a ton.

[antaldaniel]

@JosiahParry
Thanks for mentioning this. I am interested as I am starting a large, 3-year, open-source music data project, but what you write concerns me, too. I am not so much concerned with the legal aspects of the 'grey zone' but the ethical ones.

Do you think it would be a compromise to limit the use of the package somehow to include only 'verified artists', who permitted genius.com to use their lyrics?

I will try to fix the genius_url() and send a PR so that you will have my credentials as a contributor. Then I will ask for ethical advice before putting the package back on CRAN, if at all. I am affiliated with the Internet Law Research Institute and work on various modernization of European copyright law, particularly on metadata and diversity issues. I do not want to engage in any practices that is undermining the copyrights of lyrics authors.

[JosiahParry]

I can't make any of those determinations for you, unfortunately. Scraping their site is a violation of the ToS and that alone makes me feel uncomfortable building tools to enable it—though I think web scraping should be free and legal. Another python library wrote a smidgen about this.

https://lyricsgenius.readthedocs.io/en/master/how_it_works.html