Why I Created Lyricut: Solving a Real Radio Problem
One wrong word can cost you $250,000 in fines. Here's how I built Lyricut.com and the Lyricut Editor to solve radio censorship problems—and why thousands worldwide are now using them.
Why I Created Lyricut: Solving a Real Radio Problem
If you’ve ever tried to play music on the radio, you know the stakes are high. One wrong word can cost you thousands in fines. Here’s why I built Lyricut.com and the Lyricut Editor—and why thousands of people around the world are now using them.
The Problem: Radio Censorship Is No Joke
I work in radio, managing what music gets played on our station. Most people know you can’t say the F-word on air. But in Guyana—and probably many other places—the rules go way further.
We have a serious drinking problem in our country, so the regulators decided: no promoting alcohol on the radio. That’s fine in principle, but here’s the catch: most “clean” versions of songs you find online still mention drinking Hennessy or other brands. In Guyana, that’s a $250,000 fine per incident from the GNBA.
So I needed to edit every single song before it hit the airwaves.
My Ears Betrayed Me
Here’s where it got tricky. After years of listening to hip-hop, my ears had gone numb to certain references. Someone could say “Hennessy” and I’d miss it entirely—I was trained to listen to music differently than the average person. A three-minute song might need three or four plays before I was confident it was clean. That’s way too slow for radio.
The First Solution: Lyricut.com
I needed a faster way to scan songs. So I built Lyricut.com using the Genius.com API (formerly Rap Genius). It pulls song lyrics and lets me search for specific words, showing exactly where they appear in the track.
No more playing songs blind. Now I could know instantly if even a Justin Bieber track had a problematic word—without listening to the whole thing. That was it. Simple. One function: find words in songs.
The Second Solution: Lyricut Editor
But being a lazy developer, I wanted to go further. I built the Lyricut Editor.
You upload an MP3, it identifies the same flagged words from Lyricut.com, but now you decide what happens to them:
- Scratch it
- Mute it
- Beep it
- Play white noise over it
Hit process, and the song is edited automatically. The words are gone. My job got infinitely easier.
The Unexpected Discovery
I launched these tools for my own radio work, but something interesting happened. People from all over the world started signing up—users from countries I’d never expect. It turns out when something is a problem for you, it’s probably a problem for someone else somewhere.
I’m currently working on a short questionnaire (two or three questions) to understand exactly how people are using these tools and what their specific use cases are. If you’re a user, I’d love to hear from you soon.
That’s the story of Lyricut. Two tools born from a real problem, now helping broadcasters, editors, and creators worldwide keep their content clean—without the headache.