I’m sad to say that after three years, I’ve had to unpublish my Lyrics application from the Play Store. Four years ago, I had a vision of creating a lyrics app that could be used by any music players on the market, including my own. There was an application in the market previously that legally showed lyrics, but they then decided to morph into being a music player instead of a lyric providing application, so I felt like there was again a gap for an autonomous lyrics tool that could be used by many. As such, I started digging into trying to replace this lyrics application with one of my own. Unfortunately, very few companies out there hold the licenses needed for displaying lyrics. Luckily, I found one willing to work with me. The bad news is that they wanted me to guarantee them an ad revenue rate that is barely attainable in the U.S. and Europe and I wanted to distribute to the whole world. It seems crazy to me to deny lyrics to Brazilians or Indonesians because of some archain price point set back before smartphones were invented. To complicate matters, the company wanted as much per lyric view as Spotify currently pays an artist when their song is played. Wow. I love songwriters, but getting as much per lyric view as a full Spotify song play seems a bit excessive. My repeated offers to split all ad revenue 50% were rejected. I still don’t fully understand why. So lastly, we settled on a subscription model. It was something new. Untested waters. Maybe it could work?
The deal was struck, and I built the lyrics app I wanted. You could view lyrics within the app, or any music player could integrate with the app to see lyrics directly. It wasn’t a competing music player, it was a source of lyrics for all Android users. I was pumped to have created what Android needed. However, within two weeks of release, I had my answer. People don’t want to pay for lyrics. During the trial period, a high percentage of users were loving the app. Usage was extremely high. Feedback was great. Then the paywall hit. Under 1% of users who were loving the app were willing to support my work and the songwriters with cash. That trend held true for three years. I lost money every single year, plus the development cost. I held out hope but in the end nothing was going to change unless the business model changed.
I made one last pitch to the company holding the licenses for an ad model. I thought maybe three years would have been enough to move from the crazy high minimums being imposed across the world, but alas, it was not enough.
Maybe one day I’ll find a lyrics deal that makes sense as a business model. The code is already written. Until then, I’ll curiously watch the market. My guess is that companies and apps in the lyrics market will come and go until someone secures a deal with a much lower minimum. Maybe Genius has done that. Maybe MusiXmatch has. If they haven’t secured a partnership type deal, I think they won’t be around too long.
In the end, I hate to see the end of Lyrics from JRT Studio but I have to put my time and energy into my other apps. Thank you to those that did support this experiment. It really does mean a lot to me. I hope you understand this decision.
-Justin
At this point, Fuel Music Player is what we’d call high-quality beta software. Tons of features are missing, planned and on the way, so if you give it a try, we’d love to hear your feedback as we continue to improve the app going forward.
I hear you saying, what about Rocket Player?!? Well, Rocket Player isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t dead and still has features that are not available in Fuel Music Player. We love music players and our nine years of experience developing on Android tells us there is no “best” designed player. As such, we plan to continue to develop both, cross-pollinating features when it makes sense, but they are different players with different feels. You are free to love one more than the other, or love both the same!
As always, our apps have feedback buttons, feel free to use them! We’d love to hear from you.
Update: 5/30/18 - Amazon finally got back to us with a response, and it seems to be a canned response saying some apps get restricted. Nothing in the Amazon Dev Console UI says the app is restricted, nor does the submission accepted email. We've asked for more information.
Update: 6/02/18 - Amazon didn't say why Rocket Player isn't showing in the store, despite saying it is live. However, Amazon noted that Rocket Player failed one test, which I was aware of. I fixed that test and re-submitted, and it appears Rocket Player is available again.
-Justin 
