Latrobe dad, daughter develop song texting app for iPhone users

If you’re tired of texting words, photos and GIFs, a Latrobe father and daughter are hoping you’ll try a new app they developed that sends song clips.

Lyritext launched Sept. 1 in the Apple App Store, offering brief clips from a catalog of more than 100,000 songs in numerous genres, from golden oldies to current sounds, from American artists and others around the world.

Lyritext is available to iPhone users, with a seven-day free trial and a $2.99-per-month subscription that can be canceled at any time. Lyritext does not sell advertising and doesn’t collect data to sell to other entities.

“We want users to have worry-free fun interacting with their friends, family and others while sharing their love of music,” said Adam Gardner, who developed the concept with his daughter, Addie Gardner.

The seeds for the app germinated about six years ago, when Adam would pick up Addie, now 20 and a Duquesne University student, from the Ellis School in Pittsburgh for the drive to Ligonier, where they lived at the time.

Most of the commute was spent listening to First Wave, a Sirius XM channel playing 1980s alternative music from the likes of Depeche Mode, Men At Work, Blondie and a shared favorite, The Talking Heads.

“We started playing games with the song titles and artists and tried to trick each other into a conversation about the song name or artist without the other person realizing it,” Adam said. “For example, if R.E.M.’s ‘Can’t Get There From Here’ was playing, I might say to Addie, ‘Oh no, the road is closed and we can’t get there from here,’ and she would get all worried until she realized that was the song playing on the radio.”

An idea is born

After one particularly long day with hours of homework still ahead, Addie received a text from a friend wanting to come over.

”This was the last thing Addie wanted that night, and it just so happened that Men at Work’s ‘Who Can it Be Now’ was playing, with the lyrics, ‘Stay away, don’t you invade my home,’” Adam said. “I looked at Addie and said, ‘You could just text her that,’ and Lyritext was born.”

Shirley McMarlin | Tribune-Review

Adam Gardner and his daughter, Addie Gardner (on phone), of Latrobe developed the song clip texting app Lyritext, available from the Apple App Store.

“We were looking at it as a fun project, but it has the potential to take off, since everybody loves music and everyone has a smartphone,” Addie said.

Coming up with a name and logo was easy for Adam, who owns BattleZone Latrobe and GOG Paintball in Loyalhanna and, with wife Michelle Gardner, operates Thistledown Inn in Ligonier.

He applied for a provisional patent to protect the idea and worked with Chetu, a Florida-based app developer, to bring the concept to reality.

Once the patent was issued, the plan was to raise funds for song licensing with a Kickstarter campaign. They raised only $974 of their $125,000 goal.

“There were definitely moments when it felt like it wasn’t gonna happen,” Addie said. “Dad kept pushing and finding other ways to get it done.”

“You can’t be afraid of a ‘no’ or rejection, or it will never happen,” Adam said. “I guess, at that point, we were pretty demoralized; and it probably would have been a good idea to throw in the towel, but that just isn’t something that we were comfortable doing.”

Adam started calling music industry writers and public relations people and eventually ended up being referred to Songclip, a technology platform for integrating licensed music on social and digital platforms.

“What’s interesting was that Songclip had pursued almost this same path a couple years prior, with a similar concept just done differently,” Adam said. “They ran into the same hurdles we did with licensing, so they pivoted their direction to try to solve the licensing problem for the small companies.

“We’re actually their first licensed release,” he said. “Several dozen are in the works, but we’re the first one to hit the market, so it’s pretty exciting.”

More songs coming

It would be a monumental, if not impossible, task for an individual to secure music licensing rights, given the number of artists, management companies, record labels, publishers and others involved in ownership, Adam said.

“It took over a year for the folks at Songclip to work out the details of the deal” with many of the industry’s largest labels and publishers, he said.

More songs will continue to be added. Songclip sends the Gardners lists of available songs and they choose the clips to be used from each one.

“With the first group, it took me 11 hours to scroll through the song list,” Adam said.

His financial investment in Lyritext “is definitely in the six figures so far, and there will be a lot of investment going forward,” Adam said.

If the app starts to make money, “Apple and the music industry will get most of it,” he said. “The more your app is dependent on music, the more they want. At end of day, if we can get 6,000 or 7,000 subscribers, we’ll break even. If we get 100,000 or a million, we’ll do real well.”

At that point, they might consider developing an app for Android users.

“We didn’t want to spend money and time to develop something for another platform until this one is successful,” Adam said.

Lyritext currently is available only in the United States.

“Currently, Songclip is working on international rights and they think, within a year, we’ll be ready to go worldwide,” Adam said.

“Will people love Lyritext as much as we do? I guess time will tell,” Addie said. “But, regardless of the outcome, the experience that I have had with my father, seeing this project develop from a conversation during our ride home from school to an app in the App Store has been priceless.”