Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-45140188-20200910094244/@comment-1038387-20200910100803

An explanation is given on the main page.

"We regret to inform you that the Lyrics Wiki community will be closed by Fandom on September 21, 2020.

This decision was made after some difficult conversations Fandom had in an attempt to find a path forward for this wiki. A number of you have invested large amounts of time in trying to make this community thrive - we deeply appreciate that effort and respect their dedication.

Unfortunately, a number of factors have made this closure necessary. First, Fandom must continually renew our various licensing agreements in order to host lyrics. Over the years, the cost of these licenses have increased and put a strain on the return on investment in terms of revenue.

Additionally, we are sensitive to a number of lyrics on this wiki that have problematic words and themes in them which generally do not belong on our network. As a compromise, we disabled a number of editing features last year. That was not a good long-term solution for a wiki community as editing is core to its health and growth.

Ultimately the decision was reached due to Fandom’s continued migrations onto our Unified Community Platform. LyricsWiki has a number of custom features that would have had to be completely redeveloped to work in a modern MediaWiki installation. It was simply not possible to justify the massive lift from our engineers to make one or two features work only for this one wiki.

Due to the complex legal arrangements with our licensing for this wiki, we will not be able to offer a content dump after closure."