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I made an app some years ago that let you order custom song books with chords (physical books), to play the guitar / sing along at campfires etc. I integrated the app with Spotify, a printing API, stripe, and ordered a few books for myself (basically you could import some Spotify playlists or just add some songs), compile it into a book and then place your order and get it delivered at home… all automated. I thought I could turn this into a nice SaaS, until I was told this is illegal as the lyrics and tabs/chords are protected by copyright. I couldn’t find more motivation after this major roadblock so I gave up. It’s still up and running, but only I have access to the printing feature. The name which I thought was clever was actually kinda confusing to people (lyrink.com as in lyrics + ink) and always autocorrected to “lyrics”. I worked on this printing feature for many months. There’s some really interesting programming challenges with trying to fit dynamic content from the internet, with chords and lyrics (where the chords have to be placed correctly near the lyrics) etc. into a nicely formatted physical book (without using a monospaced font)


Well… yes, of course those things are copyrighted. I'm a bit surprised you didn't foresee that issue.

But still, it sounds like you learned a lot about Stripe and that other API. Those are good skills to have. If nothing else you've padded your resume quite strongly, so the project wasn't entirely for nothing.


If you made it free and have it spit out a pdf that nefarious users could realize could be bound easily …




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