"We soon ranked for competitive keywords such as "Cash Advance," "Payday Loans," and a few EDU lead generation terms. Our success led to Google receiving a number of spam complaints along with some unfavorable press in the Guardian that referred to me as genius/fiend. The consequence of all of this is that we were penalized by Google. We no longer ranked for "Free Online Dating" and other dating related keywords. In fact, we no longer even rank for very brand-specific keywords such as "JustSayHi". In short, we had been completely banned from search results.
As soon as we discovered that we had been penalized, we immediately filed a reconsideration request. Matt Cutts got involved in the case personally, but after a couple of emails, the penalty was not lifted."
Sounds familiar!
I think matt's strategy today would be more of a growth hack than a link building strategy. I think egobait still works quite well.
However if you are looking to make money and you don't have a value add to offer, it's very easy to quickly throw together a website, plaster some ads, do blackhat SEO, and very quickly make a lot of money while only working 10 hours/week since you don't have to actually worry about providing anyone anything of value (and it's not like doing blackhat SEO is that difficult to do).
Because of the above, if you are strictly looking at ROI and SEO is one of your main sources for traffic (which would be the case for a lyrics site) it makes a lot more sense to focus your efforts on SEO than it does to focus your efforts on creating an awesome website.
Edit: For whoever downvoted me, if you think I'm wrong I'd love to hear why.
I am not sure which blackhat strategies you are referring to, but I find that long term the ROI on doing legit strategies greatly outperforms blackhat strategies. (I should note that i have no idea how to cloak or hack edu sites, so I am mostly referring to buying links, and other link schemes.)
Look at a site like The Oatmeal. Look at matt inmans old dating site http://www.oneplusyou.com/q that linkbuilding strategy is amazingly effective.
More importantly, I find focusing on building referral traffic not only makes me not depend on search traffic, but it also drives up my search rankings.