lemvista.de, Opus Mortem

When I was 18, I drove with my friends Kenny and Markus (shoutout!) to Ludwigsburg, to a place called the Rockfabrik — a club exclusively for heavy metal, rock, and punk.

The drive there and back took a little over an hour, and there was always plenty to talk about.

In 1999 we were driving home and I had a terrible earworm — a song that wouldn't leave my head. I still had fragments of the lyrics rattling around in my mind. The internet was still in its infancy, and while Google was a known name, it wasn't nearly as powerful as it is today.

Still, after a long, long time, I managed to "google" the song.

I thought about this phenomenon for a while, and one afternoon at school — I was doing an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for application development in Stuttgart at the time — I built a website where you could upload song lyrics and find songs that were stuck in your head.

The first song I added to the database was my earworm from the Rockfabrik: The Cardigans – My Favourite Game.

It's hard to imagine now how crude the internet was back then. Mobile phones were three-to-four-line monochrome bricks. YouTube, with all its music, didn't exist yet.

So, My Favourite Game became the song with ID 1. At home, my brother had a collection of CDs with booklets containing lyrics. I typed them all out by hand — OCR wasn't reliable yet and I didn't have a scanner.

In the end I had around 200 song lyrics, an index, a search function, and a small forum on the site. I hosted everything on my school's server, where I had a quota of 20 MB.

Every now and then I'd borrow a CD from a friend and copy the lyrics from the booklet into my database, which I named lemvista — after my nickname "lemming". There was already an AltaVista, so this was my lemvista.

Since the database worked like a wiki — before wikis were a thing — anyone could add lyrics. I noticed that the site was gradually being picked up by search engines, almost as if by magic — well, by Google — and people started adding lyrics themselves.

Occasionally I received bizarre requests. Someone, for example, had added every single Metallica lyric to the database, except for one song — "Die, Die, My Darling" — which I had added. Their request was that I delete my entry so they could have all the lyrics listed under their name. Weird. I complied, but I also added the submitter's name — as they called themselves in the forum — next to the song title in both the search function and the catalogue.

That triggered a genuine stampede across entire artists' catalogues. People wanted their name next to their idols.

I added more features: the last five songs added along with the submitter's name now appeared on the lemvista homepage.

There was no stopping it. What had started as 200 lyrics grew to 39,000. I went to my teacher and explained that the storage space was no longer enough and I needed more room. He doubled my quota, but also asked me to find a new home for the site long-term, since it was by then responsible for more than 99% of the school's total traffic.

I found a new home at Hetzner and, for the first time, got hands-on experience with Linux, web servers, domains, and all the rest.

That came at a cost. I was barely earning any money back then, and 100 Deutschmarks a month in server fees was absurdly expensive. On top of that, I suddenly found myself in a kind of community manager role.

The jump from 39,000 lyrics to nearly 100,000 happened within a matter of weeks. The site seemed to be exploding in popularity.

I added new sections for chords, sheet music, and news, along with a Top 10 of the most prolific submitters. New layout too.

By 2001 I had tens of thousands of page impressions a day — and nothing but costs. The advertising deals I tried to put on the site brought in a few pitiful cents a day.

On top of my actual job as a programmer, managing the site had become too much. For a hobby project, it was a lot of work — more than I could handle.

What I found remarkable was how strong the submitters' need for recognition was. Lyrics were being added just to get your name on the homepage next to the last five entries.

Lyrics were added just to claim a particular ID in the database. "Your song such-and-such was added with ID 100,000." There were actual competitions to hit these milestone numbers.

There was a race to stay in the Top 10.

Spent the whole evening adding 200 lyrics. That should be enough to stay in the Top 10 for the next two weeks.

Absurd. I had created a kind of digital medal board that was increasingly spiralling out of my control. When I expanded the Top 10 into a Top 50, that was the day the internet truly came knocking.

Someone on lemvista.de had tracked down my parents' phone number — I was still living at home — and called my mother to ask what on earth I thought I was doing by "devaluing" the Top 10 with a Top 50.

My mother, who had no idea the website even existed, was rather shocked to have strangers calling up and making demands about a Top 10 list.

The compromise was a Top 10, followed by a very long stretch of nothing, and then a Top 11–50.

Absurd. Something had to change. I was done.

I thought about handing the site over to the most active forum members. That's also why I had no interest in the advertising deals that kept landing in my inbox. One of them came from Marek Bärlein, who was already doing SEO at the time, and my site apparently had — unbeknownst to me — considerable potential. In an email he asked whether I'd be interested in a "partnership". I declined, saying I had other plans for the site.

I wanted to get rid of it.

Marek wrote back asking what I was planning, and I said "give it away". Back came an immediate reply: "How much?"

I was on my lunch break at the time. I turned to a colleague who was also a fan of the site and told her, "Someone wants to buy lemvista.de." She asked, "Oh wow, how much are you thinking?" I said, "No idea. €300?" That would have almost covered the server costs.

She told me I was out of my mind. "You should be asking for €30,000."

I turned back to my computer and typed to Marek: "€3,000?" With a question mark. A minute later an email arrived: "Sold."

Obviously I was pleased. I probably could have asked for more, but in the end it was no longer entirely my site, and the money was enough for my driving licence and my first car — a beat-up Suzuki I bought off a colleague.

I had learned a great deal, and I was glad that lemvista.de had a good home with Marek for a while longer.

I actually ran into Marek years later in the Berlin startup scene, in an entirely different context. Small world.

Addendum: As it looks like the domain lemvista.de was free again and I just bought it back. Lucky me.