If Dolphins is a trap street, it is working as intended by proving that lyric sites all copy each other.
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I have a vivid memory of Neil Young performing a mind-blowing rendition of “Rockin’ in the Free World” at LiveAid in 1985.
I spent a frustrating afternoon recently looking for it on YouTube only to discover that there was no recording of it and that Neil Young’s performance at LiveAid was actually kind of lacklustre.
Discovering that the song wasn’t recorded until 1989 wasn’t enough to shake my cognitive dissonance. Only reading that the line “Kinder, gentler, machine-gun hand” was a reference to something George Bush had said (and not Ronald Reagan as I remembered) was enough to cause some cracks in my belief.
And even now, I still have that memory with no idea where it came from.
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I was going to comment, “Isn’t it ironic?”, but, apparently that was Alanis Morissette and not Avril Lavigne.
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Um… That probably is ironic.
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Clearly we have been transported here from a parallel universe 
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Why’da you have to go and make everything so… you know
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I have a trap street in my back garden. Well, not a street exactly, but OS maps show a building that doesn’t exist, and almost certainly never did (it would cover at least part of my neighbours gardens too).
It wouldn’t be visible from the street, so you’d only know it was/wasn’t there by aerial photography or actually coming into our garden.
I’ve never seen it on other maps, so if it is a trap, it’s one that’s never been ‘triggered’, but then I’m guessing other map companies know better than to fuck with the Ordinance Survey.
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I recently discovered something similar re a tag over my property on very old OS maps. No historical evidence that the tag was ever true. It think it is misplaced from further down the road (like Google Maps often does). I think it got on one map once and then propagated through several editions (where they do minor updates) before an updated survey relocated it. Weird.
(PS Ordnance Survey - not ordinance. You just fucked with the Ordnance Survey! 
)
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The “thousand points of light” in the song was a Bush dig, too. In your defense, I think by '85 Young started heading back into a heavy distortion phase, so it’s understandable you’d think it was from that Live Aid show.
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Some years back, I set out to try to fix the incorrect airdates for Thundercats on IMDb and various other websites.
Thundercats had two production seasons but four air seasons. The “second season” was produced as 65 episodes all at one shot, but aired as a TV movie and then three 20-episode seasons across the course of 3 years. Somewhere along the line, somebody just made up airdates for the second season; they were wrong, but they wound up on IMDb and all over the Internet.
At any rate, I hit a wall trying to fix the dates on IMDb, because I didn’t have a source with specific airdates. (I did have the copyright dates from the episodes’ end credits, but apparently this wasn’t enough to prove to IMDb that an episode with a 1988 copyright did not originally air in 1986.) They didn’t require a source for the person who first entered the airdates, but they needed one in order to remove or change them.
Anyway, eventually somebody published a book (Hear the Roar by David Crichton) that corroborated my claim, and, that reference in hand, I was, at last, able to convince IMDb to change the airdates for Thundercats.
The kicker is that I know Crichton’s airdates are just best guesses; finding specific episode-by-episode airdate information for a syndicated children’s cartoon from the 1980s is basically impossible, and he says as much in the book. But on the plus side, his airdates definitely have the years right.
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More ironic than any of the examples laid out in the Alanis Morrisette song, in fact!
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I basically live on a trap street, sort of. My address doesn’t actually appear on the street — we’re behind another number (which is part of our building; I don’t know, Boston’s weird). But there’s a driveway running behind both of our buildings, which we share with another building around the corner, which shares the same number as my building.
This was already annoying when dealing with delivery, etc. But then the city added my building’s address as a new, separate street sign, indicating that driveway. So the “street” is actually an address, but some mapping software interprets it as a full street, and then try to find my building number on the street that’s already named for my address and … yeah.
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I’ve run into this too. MobyGames is another site like this, riddled with wrong information that they refuse to fix. My entire career on there is basically wrong and I’ve since given up writing to them about it. They demand proof that I no longer have access to (and was proprietary at the time), but I was there. It was my life they are mis-documenting. As you said, their have an impossible standard of evidence to fix the data, but accepted whatever some bored teenager typed in initially as correct.
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Unless, like the Dolphin song, the fictitious place manages to simply will itself into existance.
That happened to Agloe, New York, among other places. An invented “trap town” that then… existed.
If you then include such a town on your map, or the lyrics to “Dolphin” on your site, can you really be said to be breaching copyright?
(An invented idea willing itself into existence sounds like something out of a Terry Pratchett book.)
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Well, a “trap street” or similar gets entered under the premise that it will be duplicated - it’s there for the purposes of legal action when that happens. But the legal action clearly didn’t occur in this case. Also, at least some of these databases are filled with user-submitted content, where the insertion of traps doesn’t make sense.
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it’s not perfect, but my go-to for lyrics is genius.com.
the userbase can annotate the lyrics to explain slang, double entendre, references and etc, which I take to mean the approved users can edit as well.
it started as rapgenius.com since rap has so many references and slang that a cold read would not obviate, so it’s been set up like that from the beginning as a fan site rather than monetizing scrapes.
but realistically, they must use scrapes, too.
oh, and if you use Firefox you can add their search to your searchbar, so it’s much handier that way.
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Not something I’ve ever come across in all the years I’ve been buying music, on vinyl or CD, and as the artists responsible for writing the lyrics and music are responsible for recording them as well, what reason could there be for incorrect lyrics appearing on the album liner notes, other that proofreading errors.
Which also raises the question; why, when the correct lyrics are readily available on CD booklets and vinyl album sleeves, should online lyric sites get the lyrics wrong? Even if English isn’t your first language, it’s just copying letters and words - I can’t speak German or Danish, but I’m pretty sure I could, with a bit of effort, copy lyrics in those and other languages if I had half a mind to.
You and I have very different experiences. Maybe the bands you follow are more thoughtful about it? I know some bands are very deliberate and careful with things outside of their music (promo material, art, and things like liner notes). Others aren’t.
Sorry to disappoint you, but these sorts of things happen all the time (discrepancies between lyric booklets and actual songs). That’s why websites like Genius always transcribe from the song itself rather than the booklet.
Here’s a wiki of examples specific to They Might Be Giants: Problems With Liner Notes - TMBW: The They Might Be Giants Knowledge Base
I’m actually surprised how few results talk about it. Most liner notes didn’t include lyrics, but for the few that did I remember often there were inconsistencies. My guess was always that some intern transcribed bad lyrics or they were from an early version of the song. Often musicians will change the lyrics for live performances.
I have a memory of the New Pornographers associated with the very late 80’s. They didn’t form until 1997 and their first album was released in 2000. I can still see in my mind the false Georgia Straight cover featuring Neko Case.
Maybe there is something in music that does this to us.
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