[HN Gopher] Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
___________________________________________________________________
Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
Author : cytosine
Score : 231 points
Date : 2021-09-16 11:53 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloombergquint.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloombergquint.com)
| Larrikin wrote:
| It was an interesting idea but I never really found much reason
| to use it over OHHLA.
| chrisofspades wrote:
| I remember in the beginning of Rap Genius it seemed like a lot
| of the lyrics were just scraped from OHHLA. I didn't even
| realize OHHLA was still around.
| g8oz wrote:
| OHHLA (Original Hip-Hop (Rap) Lyrics Archive) is a 1 man labor
| of love and represents the spirit of the old Internet.
|
| That said it doesn't look like it has been updated since 2019.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Given all the hubbub and attention surrounding Genius, I'm
| surprised they're not actually bigger than $80 million.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| If I'm curious about a pop song it's a good site for annotations.
| At least as interesting as VH1's classic Pop Up Video.
|
| For my more niche music tastes, the songs are never annotated or
| commented on even. A vision of annotating the planet seems
| unlikely when the music annotation site can't even annotate all
| the music genres.
| bttrsctchcld wrote:
| this is it, and something I (as someone who works in music
| journalism and knows folks who've worked in editorial at
| Genius) tried to communicate to Genius for a long time. the
| core music annotation was just never robust enough. too many
| songs with no annotations, sparse annotations, or low-quality
| annotations, especially once you're talking about songs beyond
| the Hot 100 or an all-time best list.
|
| the ideal content, I think, would be high-quality trivial
| produced by music nerds across the site. instead it seems a lot
| of the annotations are written by young hardcore fans of
| particular superstars, and their annotations are often far more
| enamored and speculative than insightful.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Genius's mission was to "create the Internet Talmud," wrote
| Marc Andreessen in a blog post in 2012, referring to interpretive
| texts on Judaism. He suggested the company could expand to
| "annotate the world," including "poetry, literature, the Bible,
| political speeches, legal texts, science papers." In fact, it had
| trouble expanding beyond its core group of music fans.
|
| Just looking at Marc Andressen's article linked here[1] shows why
| that failed. The article is unreadable. The Genius UI works for
| rap and poetry, because there entire lines are highlighted. But
| seeing a sentence, a phrase or even a word highlighted is
| jarring. I wasn't able to read three paragraphs of it.
|
| [1]: https://genius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-andreessen-
| horowitz-i...
| gootler wrote:
| that's called money laundering
| baybal2 wrote:
| Does anybody remember a Taiwanese computer brand called Genius? I
| remember they were everywhere once, and then disappeared equally
| fast.
| jhgb wrote:
| Well...that's the company that came to my mind when I read the
| headline? I didn't know there was another one.
| abcd_f wrote:
| The one from the early 90s? Produced pretty decent mice among
| other things.
|
| Edit: found them, still alive, still making the periphery -
| https://us.geniusnet.com/about
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I do... Actually I also thought the article was talking about
| Genius hardware at first :-).
|
| On my mind, they used to occupy a space in the 90s that is now
| taken by Logitech. Not sure what happened to Genius!
| robin_reala wrote:
| They made mice originally, ISTR? I had one in the late 80s,
| bundled with a paint package called Dr Halo.
| amelius wrote:
| They also were among the first to sell handscanners.
|
| E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulccjXS0wPk
| mkl wrote:
| They (or some derivative of them) are still around making PC
| peripherals, so I don't remember them disappearing. Somewhere I
| still have the very clicky sharp-cornered three button 1988
| Genius mouse[1][2][3] from our first computer (XT clone, amber
| monochrome screen I used to draw in Dr Halo with that mouse).
|
| [1] http://www.tcocd.de/Pictures/Peripheral/Genius/gm6000.shtml
|
| [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/wontolla/3979875305
|
| [3] https://www.todocoleccion.net/segunda-mano/antiguo-raton-
| gen...
| weeblewobble wrote:
| Just some random anecdotes...
|
| Circa 2013 I was a tech conference attended by a contingent of
| RapGenius engineers. They were incredibly obnoxious. Loud,
| arrogant, boisterous, with no regard for anyone around them. This
| was when RG was getting a ton of hype and these engineers at
| least clearly let it get to their head. I distinctly remember one
| of them walking around in a t-shirt with "FUCK FUCK SWAG" printed
| on the front in huge letters.
|
| Years later, through my wife, I became friendly with a high-level
| engineering manager at what had become Genius. Totally normal,
| down to earth guy. I liked him a lot. From talking to him, I got
| the impression that the company had "grown up" a lot. It was
| clear that they were very aware of the perception described above
| and were faintly embarrassed about it.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| man I totally remember that, literally the biggest douchebags I
| have ever seen in my life.
|
| All they did was make a website with comments lmao
| 1cvmask wrote:
| It would be good to see a post-mortem autopsy of why it failed
| since it was so hyped and well funded.
|
| Or perhaps it might have succeeded in the long run if it was not
| so hyped and well funded?
| ignoramous wrote:
| I guess, the hype was around their potential (of annotating all
| of world's knowledge): https://archive.is/lYGTg Alas, they
| couldn't achieve it, for one reason or another. Startups
| (ambitious goals) are hard.
| bluedino wrote:
| How is a song lyrics site worth any money? It was one of the
| most dot-com ideas ever.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Their bigger goal was to annotate everything, speeches,
| congressional bills, etc.
|
| I believe one of their founders spazzed out on Vyvanse once
| (or that's what he blamed it on):
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/01/rap-genius-insane/amp/
|
| _"We take Vyvanse sometimes to turn up, at least I do. One
| of the reasons is I'm allergic to coffee. But also, you take
| one of those and it makes you feel so powerful."
|
| "We would do naked Adderall. This is before Y Combinator. It
| was just a germ. We'd stay there the whole day and work. We'd
| come up with fun theories. We came up with a theory that if
| you got a woman pregnant while on Adderall, the baby would be
| smarter. But only if the woman is also on Adderall."_
|
| Lol.
|
| I almost interviewed for them, but they insinuated they'd
| like you to perform a rap song in front of their team.
|
| Pretty standard riding the startup-high unrealistic company -
| all doped up on speed (from their own words, and boy do I
| believe them).
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Absolutely hilarious. If I was doing a startup and looking
| for funding, I'd be making sure I don't remind Andreesen
| Horowitz at all of these guys...
| rchaud wrote:
| Because the money comes entirely from the VCs, who care more
| about growth than revenue. The goal should be to ride that VC
| gravy train as long as possible and spare the rest of society
| their V2.0 "monetized" product.
| stefan_ wrote:
| What if annotating things is just not that worthwhile a
| business?
| dphnx wrote:
| This is sad news, genius.com is still my go-to website for lyrics
| and interpretations.
|
| I've been a fan of Genius since they were featured in an episode
| of Small Empires[1], a series by the Verge presented by Alexis
| Ohanian (an investor in then-named Rap Genius), eight years ago.
| While I'm glad they expanded beyond annotations for rap music
| into other genres, it doesn't surprise me that they struggled to
| expand beyond music.
|
| Reading the article, I wonder if layoffs mean they'll stop
| producing their artist Lyrics & Meaning video series on
| YouTube[2]. I hope not because it's a unique angle. Either way
| I'm sure the website will live on, I just hope the new owners
| don't destroy it through monetization.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T92-MTJYmFc [2]:
| https://www.youtube.com/rapgenius
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| That's funny because I saw that too and they came off as
| charlatans to me.
| [deleted]
| Lammy wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pLRa-ZiTg "RapGenius-dot-
| com is white devil sophistry. Urban Dictionary is for demons
| with college degrees. Google ad technology is artificial
| karma, B. Rick Ross on the radio at the pharmacy."
| rrbrambley wrote:
| Awwww, I forgot about this album. Gonna spend all day
| relistening.
| runj__ wrote:
| It's the interpretations that will be difficult to replicate
| elsewhere, I used it a lot studying literature. It's difficult
| to extract money and gather a large audience/contributors from
| something like that.
| EvRev wrote:
| My guess is that the content will be generated and produced in
| an automated manner. Or the new company will bring in their own
| production team for content.
| gfaure wrote:
| I love the artist-provided annotations when they're available,
| but they really need to take a good look at the low quality of
| the vast majority of their user-generated content. It doesn't
| help that so much of it is pure speculation, highly subjective,
| or plain wrong.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Agreed. The quality is spotty and just not great, on average.
| Every now and then, I hear a lyric and go check Genius, but
| most of the time, there are no annotations at all for a given
| lyric. No disrespect, it's extremely challenging to get
| quality right for user-generated content, and even if they
| had, it's not obvious to me that it would have been a great
| business.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| Check out genius on a mobile browser. It's literally unusable.
| Rapgenius was great but its decline was very obvious.
| athorax wrote:
| Seems to work fine for me. What exactly makes it unusable?
| Graziano_M wrote:
| You're right. It seems to have been fixed. Mere weeks ago
| when you clicked on a line to see its annotation you
| literally could not see it behind all the ads, as in it was
| impossible to get to the annotation.
| ratww wrote:
| It's still broken for me half the time. And ad-blocker
| does help.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Just wanted to say you're not crazy - the ads have gotten
| bad even on the desktop. Ad blockers obviously solve the
| problem, but the UX is terrible if you're in the majority
| that doesn't use one.
|
| I took this as an early sign of the website's eventual
| demise.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| $80 million would have been a fantastic exit for a bootstrapped
| Genius.com
|
| The fact that they took more than $80 million in investment to
| get to this point is what makes this a failure. Also raises a lot
| of questions about how a company needed so much investment money
| to build a website that never really did much more than allow
| people to annotate text.
|
| I suppose licensing fees could have been extraordinarily high.
| But then again, they were likely high because the music industry
| knew they could extract all of that VC money right out of the
| company through licensing fees.
|
| The entire product was built on top of lyrics they don't own. In
| essence, they built their product on top of someone else's
| platform.
| baldajan wrote:
| The $80 million price tag wouldn't have been achieved if they
| hadn't raised $80 million first. When an acquisition sells at
| the same price as money raised, good sign the company isn't
| worth that much - it's just the minimum $ amount that would
| allow the Board to sign off on it.
|
| Sometimes that minimum is too high compared to the company
| value and so no sale happens and the company just dies.
| sdljfjafsd wrote:
| > When an acquisition sells at the same price as money raised
|
| The acquisition did not sell at the same price as money
| raised so this assertion is invalid. The article directly
| stated this - did you read the article you are commenting on?
|
| "Its price tag of $80 million represents less than what it
| raised over the years in venture capital, according to
| PitchBook."
| baldajan wrote:
| I skimmed it ;) But I did looked how much they raised on
| CrunchBase, seemed to be about equal of the sales price.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > When an acquisition sells at the same price as money
| raised, good sign the company isn't worth that much - it's
| just the minimum $ amount that would allow the Board to sign
| off on it.
|
| You realize this makes absolutely no sense, right?
| baldajan wrote:
| From a pedantic perspective, maybe... another way to put
| it: real_company_worth =
| sum(valueOf(technology), valueOf(people), valueOf(assets))
| sale_price = max(total_money_raised_owed,
| real_company_worth) if sale_price ==
| total_money_raised_owed { sale_price <
| real_company_worth // likely, since rarely
| total_money_raised_owed == real_company_worth }
|
| Better?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| No, I still actually do not follow, nor does this seem
| equivalent to what you said.
|
| "sale_price < real_company_worth"
|
| This statement in that conditional seems like it could
| never be true.
|
| If sale_price == total_money_raised_owed, then
| real_company_worth <= total_money_raised_owed because
| sale_price = max(total_money_raised_owed,
| real_company_worth).
|
| Therefore, inside the conditional, sale_price =
| total_money_raised_owed >= real_company_worth, therefore
| sale_price >= real_company_worth which is the opposite of
| sale_price < real_company_worth.
|
| What am I missing? Perhaps you meant min?
| baldajan wrote:
| you're right that my math is wrong in regards to
| sale_price < real_company_worth - it should have been the
| other way around... (real_company_worth < sale_price)...
| I guess I needed more coffee...
|
| max is correct though (whichever value is highest, that
| sets the base price).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| No! Why do you think people are going to pay $80M for
| Genius if it's worth $1M?
|
| Companies rarely sell for less than the total amount
| raised. This is true. It doesn't mean that buyers
| regularly pay double for something because the company
| wouldn't otherwise sell. It means the buyers just don't
| buy it!
|
| If Genius was really only worth $1M - we probably
| wouldn't ever hear about it - because they probably
| wouldn't ever sell it for that price.
| baldajan wrote:
| Have you ever been part of a company sale before or been
| at a private meetings/meetups where founders talk about
| how they sold their business? I've never sold a company,
| but I've talked privately with many that have (and have
| raised considerable sums).
|
| Very common that the baseline is the amount of money
| raised - it's why sometimes companies die and not get
| sold. Other times, companies will use amount of money
| raised as leverage to increase the final sale price
| (based on investor expected returns).
|
| Money raised plays a huge factor in regards to sales
| price, or if a sale occurs at all.
| nemo44x wrote:
| If they had $79m in cash/liquid and no debt then their
| enterprise value was $1m and a sale for $80m would make
| sense at a $1m valuation. But yeah, doubt that.
| [deleted]
| lbotos wrote:
| I wonder how much they are paying to host the lyrics? I'd like
| to believe it's fair use because the intent is for analysis and
| "education" but they are not just hosting excerpts but probably
| millions of whole songs...
| adventured wrote:
| It's not particularly expensive to license music lyrics in
| terms of doing a start-up. The big problem is you won't be
| able to get search traffic these days. There was a rush of
| lyric sites once upon a time, during the content farm wars
| years (azlyrics.com was one of the few survivors of that,
| which remained popular). You could easily get a wave of
| search traffic (and several dozen sites did). Now if you
| launch a lyric site like that, you're more likely to get
| tagged as a shallow content farm by Google, and that's that
| you're done.
|
| The biggest cost is that you have to figure out a
| substantial, original content way to differentiate from every
| other lyric source for SEO purposes.
| vmoore wrote:
| > That never really did much more than allow people to annotate
| text
|
| So Google's search engine is crap because it allows people to
| 'only' search for a piece of information they're looking for?
| All the best startups are simple ideas.
|
| Genius also has a great search engine, & allows you to play
| small samples of songs. It is also designed well and the UI is
| intuitive. It is more than a Hypothesis[0] clone.
|
| [0] https://web.hypothes.is/
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > So Google's search engine is crap because it allows people
| to 'only' search for a piece of information they're looking
| for?
|
| You're missing two key differences:
|
| Google doesn't have to pay people to index their content.
| Genius had to pay music labels large amounts of money to
| index their content.
|
| Also, Google isn't serving up the content itself. They're
| directing people to competing content. Competition creates
| profit opportunities (ads). Genius users arrived on-site
| knowing more or less exactly what they wanted to see.
| whatever1 wrote:
| " The entire product was built on top of lyrics they don't own.
| In essence, they built their product on top of someone else's
| platform."
|
| It seems that this is the concept behind many startups that are
| successful. Airbnb, Uber/Lyft, DoorDash etc.
|
| They try to take on risky efficiencies (by undercutting labor /
| capital, RnD costs, circumventing regulation), with the hope
| that they will become too big to be stopped. For many of them
| it worked.
| asah wrote:
| Google/YouTube is built on other peoples' content...
| pessimizer wrote:
| But YouTube did it by offloading liability for copyright-
| violating content onto uploaders. Youtube for years was 80%
| megaupload, but backed by an army of lobbyists. Scribd has
| TV commercials now, and is _still_ in that stage.
| rchaud wrote:
| People forget that in 2004 there were several streaming
| video sites. They all disappeared because they featured
| copyrighted content.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Google has an actual product (ads) and YouTube isn't built
| on pre-existing content, it's a platform for content
| creation (and ads for that content). Both add a lot more
| value than Genius did.
| bliteben wrote:
| Movie clips and music videos are surely a double digit
| percent of youtube's views, not to mention other
| categories I may be missing.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Again though, they're posted by the creators (every
| artist I know of has their own Youtube account, all the
| major studios post their own teasers) versus people re-
| posting others' stuff. Most Youtube content nowadays is
| pretty original.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Nowadays. YouTube became big through users uploading
| pirated music to it.
| criley2 wrote:
| Users must give youtube a permissive license to post
| videos. Not so for lyrics on Genius.
| whatever1 wrote:
| YouTube was hosting for years pirated song video clips.
| Then they just cut a deal with the music companies
| because they did not want to be out of the biggest video
| platform of the planet.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, people forget that, for a long time, to many people
| YouTube looked like a business that would collapse the
| instant that rights holders got serious about cracking
| down on all the infringing content on the site--given
| that was what 90% of people probably went to the site
| for.
| thrashh wrote:
| But unlike Genius, YouTube was not forever beholden to
| just hosting existing content.
|
| Genius is never going to start hosting user created
| lyrics one day.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It seems that this is the concept behind many startups that
| are successful. Airbnb, Uber/Lyft, DoorDash etc.
|
| Being accesses through someone else's platform isn't the same
| thing as trying to build a business on top of someone else's
| IP.
|
| The music industry owned the core of Genius' content from the
| start.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Right, but the play is to become important faster than you
| become accountable. Collectively, we are very bad at
| holding important entities accountable, so speedrunning
| your way to importance while ignoring the rules is a gamble
| that can pay handsomely.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Crunchyroll - build on top of pirated Asian content. it got
| big enough to the point it can go legit. later sold for more
| than what its worth. (Sony pay $1 billion)
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| I liked that they had Eminem explain some of his lyrics. That was
| fucking dope!
|
| I think it's great they gave it a shot. Good stuff.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| What even is MediaLab?
|
| On their website, they have just random permutations of "AI",
| "quantum" and "Blockchain", I'm not kidding.
|
| They own... Kik and Whisper chat apps?
|
| Is it like a holding company that pretends to do some AI on the
| side? Doesn't make sense to me.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I was wondering how an MIT research lab had 80 megabucks to buy
| a website
|
| https://www.media.mit.edu/
| eaenki wrote:
| Looks like a company buying dead startups. Weird. Maybe it's
| just a company that is controlled by some VC or groups of VCs
| and that's how they make their returns and number of exits look
| better. They also look less dumb.
| nemo44x wrote:
| They could get some economy out of these once high flyers
| that still have a user base by getting rid of most of their
| payroll and having management work across the various
| properties. It's a graveyard but I'd assume they are
| structured such that they can reduce costs dramatically and
| suck these properties dry for a bit of profit.
| mpeg wrote:
| You went to the wrong website, the right site is
| https://www.medialab.la/ not http://medialab.ai/
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Ah. The holding company name is "MediaLab.Ai", so I put that
| to URL bar and that found the AI Quantum Blockchain thing.
|
| Just a holding company makes more sense.
|
| Thanks!
| pacoWebConsult wrote:
| Sad day. Love this talk from the co-founder Tom Lehman titled
| "Worse is Better" [1]
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/X45YY97FmL4
| busterarm wrote:
| Tom is an incredibly smart guy. I'm excited to see what his
| next venture might be.
| busterarm wrote:
| Downvote all you like. I know Tom personally and what I said
| is true. I am certain this is not the last that we'll hear
| from him.
| donohoe wrote:
| I worked with a large publisher many years ago and had meetings
| with Genius. They were just awful to deal with and really
| demonstrated a "we don't care about the consequences for you"
| attitude (and by this I mean: potential for trolling, abuse, and
| reputation risk - not financial).
|
| It was a sobering experience given I deeply admired what they had
| done - technically and culturally - at the time.
| uyt wrote:
| Can you give more details on what the possible consequences
| are? I just can't see how people making trollish interpretation
| of lyrics can possibly be harmful. At worse it just becomes a
| stupid meme. This is just internet culture.
| humanistbot wrote:
| I'm not the parent, but as a frequent reader of Genius, the
| annotations often discuss the connection between the lyrics
| and the artist's personal life --- sometimes with wild
| speculation. It is standard in contemporary music for artists
| to build their careers writing songs about their personal
| experiences, no matter the genre. Pop, hip-hop, country,
| folk, and punk are all filled with artists who are loved by
| their fans for successfully performing "authenticity" in
| their songs. Fans of those kinds of artists love to try and
| decode the lyrics. People go to Genius and read the
| annotations for a Taylor Swift song because they want to know
| which breakup that song is about. It gets into even more of a
| difficult situation when it comes to artists who sing/rap
| about their legally-questionable activities.
|
| Now, if you hold the belief that words on the internet can
| never hurt, you won't buy that argument. But every user-
| generated content platform needs to have a plan for
| moderation of that content. Rumors and misinformation can
| spread everywhere.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| They do have verified accounts that lets the artist
| annotate their own songs and interact with fans on the
| site. I thought that was super cool until I read some real
| cringe-worthy crap from the artist and it just killed the
| song for me.
| donohoe wrote:
| It wouldn't be appropriate to go into specifics, but I can
| add more information.
|
| It wasn't about lyrics. Thats where Genius started. They
| moved into allowing annotation for news sites.
|
| This presented copyright issues (which I wasn't complaining
| about in my original comment) where they would reproduce the
| story and images on a new domain. This presented problems as
| many publishers have contracts with writers, illustrators,
| and photographers where they need to pay them more if their
| content appears on other websites - or simply not allowed to
| have this hosted anywhere else.
|
| Genius ignored those issues and the simple copyright aspects.
|
| The other concern was that, as a publisher, if you had an
| article that wasn't liked by a powerful interest group
| (business, religion, cult, lobby, etc.), they could perform
| coordinated efforts to annotate and contradict every fact -
| those that were fact-checked and run past legal - to
| undermine reports.
|
| This isn't about how the public get to flag 'fake news', this
| is how interest groups can undermine legitimate stories.
|
| Genius were not willing to address this, or put basic
| safeguards in place to address this at any meaningful level -
| let alone giving us an option to 'opt-out'.
|
| And by the way, this was not 'hypothetical'. In my role I had
| seen how this happened in numerous forms and this was a
| bigger attack vector.
|
| I hope that helps provide the necessary context.
| gkoberger wrote:
| The (original) leadership team is notoriously horrible. Here's
| a lot of more examples:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7801084
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7801028
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/rap-genius-cofounder-moghada...
| stingrae wrote:
| This video from techcrunch disrupt kind of showed why the
| original leadership may have had issues:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I wonder what would have happened if the co-founder Mahbod
| Moghadam had not been such a jackass and gotten fired in 2014, a
| couple of years after the VC financing.
| https://www.vox.com/2014/5/26/11627246/rap-genius-co-founder...
| bifrost wrote:
| If you follow him, he has quite a few things to say about this.
| Frankly he's one of the most unique people I've ever met.
| 41209 wrote:
| As a rap fan I always felt it was silly for Genius to try and
| expand beyond it's niche.
|
| The only time I've ever used the site was to look up rap lyrics.
| It does that extremely well, but would I really trust the Rap
| Lryic site to explain the Magna Carta?
|
| You have to tell VCs something to get those sweet sweet checks.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| The entry for If by Rudyard Kipling warms my heart
| https://genius.com/1247142
| 41209 wrote:
| Thank you, that's a poem I'll need re read from time to time.
|
| How did you find this though, are you a rap fan? Maybe Rap
| genius could have split itself into two brands ?
|
| Academic genius, and Rap genius
| jrumbut wrote:
| I want to say they tried some different brandings for
| different areas at some point.
|
| Not the OP but I found the site back when it was frequently
| on top the Google search results for any lyrics, but it's a
| fun site to browse and I even contributed a few things over
| the years.
| asdff wrote:
| If they ever collaborated with sparknotes on a product they
| could have had their vision and made money hand over fist. No
| clue if sparknotes is nearly so popular among students today,
| but in my time 10 years ago it was one of the most used
| websites right behind wikipedia for students.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| As the article highlights 80M is less than what it raised in
| funding over the years.
|
| Strangely I've been visiting Genius.com more and more these days.
|
| Genius.com seems like a hold over from true web 2.0 era with a
| good social / crowd element to it and I will miss it if it goes.
| pseudolus wrote:
| The founders did a pretty funny (and cringeworthy) interview with
| TechCrunch in their early years:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo
| 1billionstories wrote:
| they got trolled well by Sacha Baron Cohen on This is America
| too
| nailer wrote:
| Contributing content on Genius is hard. You can't just suggest an
| edit and have it accepted/rejected, like wikipedia (yes wikipedia
| has it's own probs), but you instead have to reply and make a
| dialog that gets voted on. I feel like Genius loses a lot of
| potential contributions because of this.
| JackFr wrote:
| And honestly much of the content is terrible. Maybe it's better
| in rap in particular but it's rare I'll see notes on lyrics
| that aren't well known or obvious.
| Tossrock wrote:
| Time to share my favorite quote from them! (Again [1])
|
| >Mr. Ohanian asked the panel, "One of the things I see time and
| time again is that we have companies who went to the West Coast
| and then come screaming back to New York. What was the driving
| force to come back to New York?"
|
| Rap Genius' Ilan Zechory took the question first. "It's where we
| lived," he said. "It's where our friends were. There are no women
| in the Bay Area, genuinely. We never considered moving out there.
| We always felt like our West Coast trips were, like, all of us in
| a Nissan Xterra, in like a Weston, with some weed, trying to
| steal bags of money to bring back to the East Coast."
|
| Guess stealing bags of VC money couldn't work forever.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956929
| [deleted]
| eaenki wrote:
| Media lab Looks like a company buying dead startups. Weird. Maybe
| it's just a company that is controlled by some VC or groups of
| VCs and that's how they make their returns and number of exits
| look better. They also look less dumb.
| OJFord wrote:
| > He suggested the company could expand to "annotate the world,"
| including "poetry, literature, the Bible, political speeches,
| legal texts, science papers." In fact, it had trouble expanding
| beyond its core group of music fans.
|
| That sounds great to me, anybody know what caused so much
| trouble? Looking at genius.com now it's not even trying, homepage
| is all about music.
| setgree wrote:
| Like 8 years ago, I began annotating a Cormac McCarthy novel on
| Genius, and I quickly got a DM from a site admin who offered me
| a "Poetry Genius editor" position -- tons of free karma and the
| ability to make edits without review -- and encouraged me to
| keep writing. I didn't pursue it very far and a few years
| later, I got another DM from a different admin saying that they
| were reducing the number of editors and:
|
| > While reviewing your stuff, I noticed that you've got some
| really high quality work, but there are a few areas that could
| use a bit of improvement. Don't worry, this doesn't mean you're
| guaranteed to be de-editored, it just means we need to work
| together on improving your annotations/acceptances
|
| That sounded like work, so I declined :) And thus was my
| editorship revoked. I am going to guess that they had trouble
| ever getting a volunteer-editor model to stick.
|
| P.S. the original DM thread offering me an editor position
| contains this gem:
|
| > The deal with usage is this. We of course want to work on as
| much stuff in public domain (we have A LOT up there now). But
| if a newer text is elsewhere on the web we feel like it's fair
| game.
|
| Translation: if someone else shares content illegally, we can
| too
|
| P.P.S. I think their SEO shenanigans [0) set them back a lot.
| Genius results _still_ don't come up very high when I google
| lyrics sometimes.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/amp/
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Curious why bands dont enter their own lyrics? Isnt this a
| no-brainer for bands to do, so their lyrics are not mangled
| in the crowd-sourcing process? Or do they want people to
| struggle and settle upon the lyrics collectively as part of
| the entertainment process?
| notatoad wrote:
| lyrics are copyright, and the owners make money by
| licencing that content. If you search for song lyrics on
| google you get official licenced ones, not crowdsourced
| lyrics. to give them to Genius for free would de-value
| their licencing deals.
|
| if Genius was actually creating more value than the
| licencing deals, then i'm sure the labels would have been
| happy to work something out. But what's the value for the
| content owners to have their lyrics on Genius?
| jsudi wrote:
| Do the bands have the rights to the lyrics?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's either them or their record company, or maybe a
| songwriter.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Lorde got asked a similar question on Hot Ones. She
| basically said that early in her musical career, she cared
| a lot about that (iirc she did submit things to Genius),
| but nowadays she thinks it's more fun to see how other
| people interpret her songs.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| If I were in a band, I'd upload the lyrics to my _own_
| site, to help drive traffic. Then once people are seeing
| your lyrics there, they 'll see the upcoming tour schedule
| and album release date as well.
|
| Sure, Genius will then come along and copy-paste those
| lyrics, but that just means you have no reason to do it
| yourself.
| iamben wrote:
| Isn't this a bit like the ecom thing?
|
| Like - I want to buy a "Philips Electric Toothbrush". I
| _could_ go and buy it on their own site. But I 'll
| probably (sorry) go straight to Amazon.
|
| Searching and checking out on Amazon is just so much
| _mentally more efficient_ than navigating and buying from
| a site I 'm not used to.
|
| I agree bands should definitely upload their own lyrics,
| but comparatively, if I'm listening to a record and I
| want to know song lyrics or (sometimes) check what
| they're singing about - I'll just go straight to Genius
| because I know how it's likely to be there and it's easy
| to use (especially compared to lots of other lyrics
| sites). Band websites are not what they were in the 90s -
| if they have them at all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because it doesn't benefit bands in any way when you read
| their lyrics on some other site. It benefits them a
| little bit if you read their lyrics on their site,
| because you might click around and discover that they're
| going to play in your town soon and fork out, or buy
| merch.
| wpietri wrote:
| This is true only if you are an Amazon/Genius user. If
| you aren't, it's just another site.
|
| After some Amazon anti-worker horribleness a year or two
| ago, I dropped my Prime subscription and now Amazon is my
| last resort for shopping. It turns out that as a web
| experience, it's pretty garbage these days. It's crammed
| with ads and dubious listings. So I think your "mentally
| more efficient" is what I'd call "habit". Ordering books
| from my local bookstore is just as quick and is
| definitely more pleasant.
| iamben wrote:
| Yeah, perhaps. And I'm not really arguing for or against
| here. But using the Amazon example - a mass of people DO
| know about it. As a seller it makes sense for me to sell
| there as well as my own website - I'm likely never to
| outrank them for generic keywords (I have no idea how
| well Google ranks lyrics on own band sites over lyric
| sites, but I assume not as well thanks to aggressive
| SEO). As a buyer Amazon may be a habit, but they've also
| spent (probably) tens of millions of dollars on getting
| that checkout process as frictionless as possible.
| Dubious listings and ads aside, if you know what you're
| buying - another site or not - it's pretty easy.
| wpietri wrote:
| I still don't think the parallel between Amazon and
| Genius works. Amazon is hugely dominant, where millions
| of people use it daily or weekly. I'd expect that the
| overlap between Amazon users and online shoppers is very
| high. But given Genius's semi-failure, I'd be hard
| pressed to believe that Genius has a similar mindshare
| among music listeners or lyrics looker-uppers.
|
| I also don't think Amazon has spent that like you say on
| "getting that checkout process as frictionless as
| possible". What they've spent it on is magnifying
| Amazon's dominance and profitability. And a checkout
| experience is 25 years old at this point; it's not
| exactly a hotbed of innovation. My random local bookstore
| is using some perfectly solid package that does just
| fine. It's no harder to check out there than Amazon. And
| as a bonus, shopping is easier and they're always going
| to send me an authentic copy of the book.
| iamben wrote:
| Definitely not arguing your local bookstore isn't a nicer
| place to buy a book from! But I'd disagree that
| (especially once you're in the ecosystem) buying
| something on Amazon isn't pretty frictionless.
|
| Re "I'd expect that the overlap between Amazon users and
| online shoppers is very high." Honestly, I'd expect the
| same with Genius and 'people who look up lyrics often'. I
| mean - I can't name another lyrics website (apart from
| maybe songmeanings.net, which I'm not sure is still
| alive?) - and as someone who looks up lyrics a fair
| amount, Genius appears at the top of Google enough, and
| is far less spammy/shitty than any of the other random
| sites that I'll often just start there...
|
| Allll this said, perhaps my analogy wasn't perfect. But I
| stand by that if I was in a band, and I wanted to share
| my lyrics - as well as my own site (assuming I could be
| bother to maintain than AND all the social stuff), I
| would make sure they were on Genius. Perhaps with decent
| explanations for things that I added myself.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| What's in it for them? Why would they care about people
| mangling their lyrics?
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I was part of a band (of sorts) in high school. You spent
| a lot of time on lyrics. You want people to appreciate
| the art w/o misunderstanding it.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| I was in touring bands for years, and I didn't care if
| anyone ever read my lyrics, or if they misunderstood
| them.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| There are artists who supply official annotations and
| additional insight into their lyrics. Example:
| https://genius.com/4196571?
| mhh__ wrote:
| The lyrics are very rarely wrong IME.
|
| genius.com is also associated with explaining the lyrics,
| which I suspect only a minority of bands with lyrics worth
| explaining would actually do.
| trynewideas wrote:
| Most of the time I spent on Genius was fixing incorrect
| lyrics, unfortunately. They'd often be copied from
| azlyrics or other shoddy predecessors, with errors unique
| to those third-party sources but not present in liner
| notes or other official sources. Unlike say, Wikipedia,
| Genius doesn't require or clearly associate sources with
| their content, so it's not easy to show your work, check
| for accuracy, and prove the lyrics are incorrect.
|
| Meanwhile, most of Genius's featured content involved
| artists explaining their own lyrics. It's a minority of
| artists, to be sure, because curated content isn't going
| to feature a majority of artists, but it comprised most
| of their branded work.
| wpietri wrote:
| > That sounded like work, so I declined :) And thus was my
| editorship revoked. I am going to guess that they had trouble
| ever getting a volunteer-editor model to stick.
|
| As an early Quora Top Writer, I feel you on this. I really
| enjoyed it for a while, and it was nice to have an audience
| for my writing. But as the site grew and got more centrally
| controlled, it wore thin. Eventually some admin told me I was
| Doing It Wrong and I decided I'd had enough.
|
| In the years since I've decided that I'm just not going to
| give volunteer labor to for-profit things. If they want to
| make a zillion dollars, great, they can pay their workers
| like everybody else. If I get the urge to contribute, I can
| always work on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other public-benefit
| projects.
| CPLX wrote:
| I still have my "Quora Top Writer 2013" fleece jacket
| though.
|
| So there's that.
| setgree wrote:
| Funny, I had the same experience at Mic as well. In their
| early days, I was invited to contribute based on some
| distant social connection to a founder. Many years later I
| felt inspired to write something again and was told that
| they would only accept content if I wrote on their schedule
| and, IIRC, on topics of their choosing. I guess many of
| these user-generated content platforms go through similar
| growing pains on the Road To Monetization...and a lot of
| them are more fun to interact with in their "grow at all
| costs" phases
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Are your notes on McCarthy still up? Which book did you do?
|
| I'm a huge fan, and would be willing to pay to have companion
| books, that explained his books to me while I was reading
| them.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| > anybody know what caused so much trouble?
|
| Removing the co-founder, who had so much passion for the
| business?
| peterthehacker wrote:
| It sounds like a Herculean marketing effort to rebrand from rap
| music to all music then to sophisticated literature. Those
| markets are completely different.
|
| Then of course theres the copyright issues.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| Tangentially, it reminds me that probably the best book I ever
| I read, taken in the context of the time/mathematical ability
| in my life, was _The Annotated Turing_ (Charles Petzold) - a
| sort of walk-through of and background to Turing 's _On
| Computable Numbers with an Application to the
| Entscheidungsproblem_. It 's surely the most 'sci' of any 'pop
| sci' I'm aware of, taking the reader through the actual paper
| but just really explaining it all step by step at a level
| comprehensible to someone without or before any undergrad CS or
| mathematics.
|
| I'd thoroughly recommend it to (or as a gift for) any CS-
| interested teenager in your life.
| mbesto wrote:
| Genius's lack of execution is precisely the embodiment of the
| SV trope of bro culture:
|
| - Grandiose visions of product brilliance ("we're changing the
| world" = "we want to annotate it all")
|
| - Flashy "bro culture" https://venturebeat.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2013/05/rap-geniu...
|
| - Breaking the "rules" and not getting penalized for it (Google
| reverted its penalty):
| https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
|
| I rarely want companies to fail (I'm very critical of start-
| ups, but generally am happy when good people succeed), but it's
| hard for me to root for company that operates like this.
| mmmpop wrote:
| I agree, I never liked how they presented themselves. I can't
| help but associate the "culture" of the founders with that of
| the organization, but that may not always be fair.
| throwdecro wrote:
| I definitely wanted them to fail, and I'm relieved that they
| did. If they'd succeeded there might have been an onslaught
| of additional clowns you'd have to filter out when looking
| for work.
| [deleted]
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| Lyric interpretations was already an existing market, but most
| implementations weren't great. Genius built a nicer interface
| that allowed them to take that market.
|
| For everything else they'd have to create a market from
| nowhere. And people would have to be willing to donate their
| time and content to Genius to make it work.
| hobofan wrote:
| It's been some time, but as I roughly recall it:
|
| - Very few original content on the platform (and a lot of
| relevant content is already old and exists elsewhere), and
| trying to get that content on the platform is a huge copyright
| minefield.
|
| - If you as a website owner wanted to allow your users to
| annotate your content, you had to include their script snippet
| to the website. I wouldn't be suprised if a brower extension
| based method would have been better for bootstrapping that side
| of the business.
| relaxatorium wrote:
| If I remember correctly, their method for "annotate the world"
| was less expand the types of content on genius.com and more
| some sort of extension or standard for slapping their
| annotations onto other people's sites which never really took
| off and also pissed people off.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > That sounds great to me, anybody know what caused so much
| trouble?
|
| They are competing with Wikipedia?
| OJFord wrote:
| Are they? I can't go to Wikipedia for explanation of 'poetry,
| literature, [...] political speeches, legal texts, science
| papers' aside from really famous and specific examples (such
| as 'the Bible' which I omitted in quoting).
|
| Even the entry 'On Computable Numbers[ with an application to
| the Entscheidungsproblem]' for example, redirects to its
| entry in a list. [0]
|
| where the entire annotation, as it were, is:
|
| > Description: This article set the limits of computer
| science. It defined the Turing Machine, a model for all
| computations. On the other hand, it proved the undecidability
| of the halting problem and Entscheidungsproblem and by doing
| so found the limits of possible computation.
|
| As I alluded to in a sibling comment to yours, [1] the
| potential as I see it would be something more like (a less
| thorough version of) Petzold's _The Annotated Turing_ - line
| by line annotations of the actual paper, explaining anything
| non-trivial the reader might want to hover-over.
|
| I'd love to read more academic output, and I honestly think I
| would if there were an easier Genius/Petzold-style way to be
| taught the bits I'm missing as I work through it. To my
| regret I didn't stay for a PhD; I don't have a supervisor to
| nag or whom who can guide me through easy to harder to grok
| works.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publicat
| ions...
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28551572
| bambax wrote:
| The founders had a reputation for being dickish. At some point
| they got into trouble for dubious SEO tactics that got them
| delisted from the Google index. More controversially, they were
| able to unfuck themselves by reaching out to Google executives,
| while so many other companies are at the mercy of Google with
| no recourse.
| DeBraid wrote:
| The drama with Google has to be mentioned as major part of
| their company history.
|
| They also had a famous fight with heroku
|
| https://genius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-
| annotate...
| jayzalowitz wrote:
| If you are capable of making this post, you are capable of
| self hosting rails on something closer to the metal.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| I love the idea of "annotating everything" / the web.
|
| A browser extension or something would liberate people from
| these walled social media gardens of interacting. Just not
| attractive and a hard sell.
|
| I remember seeing a cringy interview of the founders.
| Candidly, I'm not surprised they couldn't convert their idea
| and make it happen with something bigger. Who knows though
| they did raise the cash.
|
| I still think there is room here though.
| bambax wrote:
| Google created Sidewiki [0] in 2009 and killed it two years
| later. It was based on a browser extension.
|
| There have been many other initiatives, some listed here
| [1]; Wikalong was interesting but riddled with spam. Maybe
| a personal system (not shared) would help prevent content
| abuse? But then it would probably offer too little value to
| really take off.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Years ago I was looking for an annotation software and didn't
| find something really good. I really liked the Genius annotations
| and thought I would've paid them money if they offered their
| platform to other who want to build websites that need
| annotation. My domain was very different and nothing to do with
| lyrics. It was also not intended for people to edit.
| wallawe wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what was your use case? I've thought
| about making a SaaS out of this in the past as a side project
| but not sure who the ideal customer would be.
| akudha wrote:
| I still don't understand how they get around the copyright
| issues. There are a bunch of lyric sites that put ads on them,
| always wondered how they are able to not break copyright rules
| airstrike wrote:
| Well, there's still https://songmeanings.com/ but sadly the
| verse-by-verse annotation feature isn't there.
| [deleted]
| david_allison wrote:
| > But the startup faced challenges. Its price tag of $80 million
| represents less than what it raised over the years in venture
| capital, according to PitchBook.
|
| It's a shame that they sold for less than their funding. The
| product is significantly better than other lyric sites, and has
| been for a long time without a hint of decent competition.
|
| It's partially been superseded by lyric integration in Spotify,
| but it still fills a useful niche, and does it well.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The product is significantly better than other lyric sites
|
| And...how much are people willing to pay for (annotated or not)
| song lyrics?
| jollybean wrote:
| People on this thread are lamenting the loss, but really
| failing to grasp how much money was spent on a fairly simple
| thing, and that is for a very narrow audience/use case.
|
| The economics for that are really, really bad and likely the
| only way it's even good, and that some people know about it is
| via their funding.
|
| Genius is really not well known outside a demo, and they don't
| rank hugely well in interactivity.
|
| While there is definitely a 'core user base' and a legit value
| proposition, it's nowhere near the valuations they were
| talking.
| acdha wrote:
| > While there is definitely a 'core user base' and a legit
| value proposition, it's nowhere near the valuations they were
| talking.
|
| That's the key thing: if I'm reading things right, they had
| hundreds of employees and offices in Brooklyn. I'd easily
| believe that they could be profitable with, say, dozens of
| employees and probably a cheaper location but an ad-supported
| site with an audience which generally isn't buying much or
| sticking around on the site for a long time seems really hard
| to square with that kind of burn rate.
| jollybean wrote:
| It was a party/hustle from the beginning. These guys have a
| VICE-like ethos.
| acdha wrote:
| It sounded like someone's hobby site which got
| unexpectedly big -- which, hey, good for them but that's
| definitely not "... and now we're ready to be a 9-figure
| company".
| jollybean wrote:
| The origin story is that 3 young urban hustlers talking
| giant miles of smack, making ridiculous claims on the
| 'pitch stage' in full Millenial bloom, managed to
| convince some major players that they were onto something
| huge. I think their talent and boldness convinced some
| investors to go along, though the total investment seems
| to be a bit much.
| byoung2 wrote:
| I used to go to the site quite often but recently I found most
| lyrics in a song have no annotations at all. Seems useless to
| check out a song with only 1 line annotated.
| colmvp wrote:
| I recall Genius was hot, hot, hot way back when. Crazy that it
| was sold for less than 100M.
| rchaud wrote:
| I still use AZLyrics and SongMeanings.net, sites that look like
| they haven't been updated in 20 years.
|
| Song lyrics websites are one of the last remnants of the
| collaborative 'old web', where people uploaded information
| simply for the enjoyment of others, with no expectation of
| monetizing beyond easily blockable banner ads. Seeing
| "genius.com" links go straight to the top of Google was
| disheartening because it reflected the opposite spirit.
| asdff wrote:
| I remember the days when the most obtrusive ad you'd see
| browsing the web was a paypal donation button
| hedberg10 wrote:
| Crazy it sold at all, really. Still overvalued.
|
| The free money bubble sets your value horizon to weird levels.
|
| I remember hard solutions being worth something, not bro apps.
| Now I'm actually not that grumpy. This happens in every
| industry, I wish everybody involved well (I regret calling it a
| bro app, I'm sure there is way more involved than I am seeing,
| but it fits here in terms of functionality), markets are fuzzy,
| I don't get to make the evaluations, prices don't reflect
| material value but market etc. - I'm just trying to figure out
| my INTJness and how people cannot see this coming.
|
| "Genius.com is going to be the Internet Talmund" and a unicorn
| - what? Based on what?
|
| WeWork/Fab.com etc. etc.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| For a site like HN which is run by YC, it's surprising to get
| so many comments like these. Making no value judgements, this
| is the startup model, investors know not every bet will win,
| so do founders. No one knows the future. It's often quoted
| that 90% of startups fail, they are hard.
|
| For every nine "how did they not see that coming"s, you'll
| get one "how did no one see that opportunity" eg. your
| Facebooks, Airbnbs, etc.
| cytzol wrote:
| I stopped using Genius after their mobile-first redesign. I
| really enjoyed reading their explanations and meanings behind
| songs I knew, with the lyrics in the centre of the screen and the
| annotations off to the side. But now, the annotations open
| _under_ the lyrics, so I can 't see the annotations and the
| lyrics at the same time, which makes it much, much harder to
| understand the explanations -- and the rest of the page is
| bizarrely limited to 350 pixels wide. I can't say I'll miss
| Genius when it's gone anymore.
| CraftThatBlock wrote:
| I think this is a bug on Firefox, as my Firefox does the same
| behavior but works fine on Chrome based browsers.
| oauea wrote:
| More like poorly implemented user agent sniffing done by
| "Genius"
| nightpool wrote:
| It's actually an AB test--we know the annotations opening
| under the lyrics is disliked by some users, so we're
| working on an alternative 2-column design, which is
| currently in A/B testing.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Good to know you're moving towards putting the
| annotations back on the side, but please deploy that for
| Firefox users too.
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| First time I hear purposefully degrading the UX being
| excused by it being A/B testing. You know it's disliked
| but still you do it?
|
| The world is going crazy
| wingerlang wrote:
| Maybe they know because of the A/B test? Seems like it
| could be a good idea and make the layout easier to use on
| mobile. I don't find it THAT bad on desktop, although on
| the side is better.
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| Have you ever worked on multivariate tests?
|
| Testing is how you learn and quantify how much something
| is disliked, or used, or leads to conversions. This is
| the perfect fit.
|
| I prefer the 1-column layout (user since it was
| rapgenius.com). If they got angry emails from their users
| about their UX, and they decided to set up a test to
| improve it, that's not in the spirit of _degrading_ the
| UX.
| dzonga wrote:
| Genius is really useful no doubt. but it's one of those companies
| that shouldn't have taken vc funding. maybe PE funds / debt
| financing yeah, every now and then to keep it stable. but once
| again the employees pay the cost.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Genius is really useful no doubt.
|
| I imagine only a tiny portion of people care about what lyrics
| mean. I can play a song in Apple Music and it shows me the
| lyrics, as I am sure the other streaming services do also.
| yarcob wrote:
| Spotify doesn't, and even for Apple Music lyrics are a
| somewhat recent addition afaik.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Spotify does, though not for all. And... those lyrics come
| from Genius, so yeah.
|
| Source: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/lyrics/
| yarcob wrote:
| I just tried with 5 songs and I couldn't get lyrics for a
| single one. It did show some trivia ("Behind the Lyrics")
| for English songs but not the lyrics themselves. Could it
| be that they don't actually have the rights to show
| lyrics?
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| It was great for rap lyrics - which makes sense because it's
| a heavily lyric-centric genre. Sometimes the artists
| themselves would provide annotations, people would provide
| context for veiled references, etc.
|
| So to me it makes all the sense in the world that they
| struggled to expand beyond that niche. The idea that the rap
| lyrics site would expand into annotating speeches or acts of
| Congress just doesn't scan.
| tallies wrote:
| Yes the value of the site was much more clear when it was
| primarily a way to demystify references and slang in rap
| lyrics - in the same vein as Urban Dictionary.
|
| But since then rap lyrics have gotten simpler and the site
| has expanded. It's interesting to compare early reactions
| from artists getting their songs annotated to its place in
| rap today.
|
| "Rap Genius dot com is white devil sophistry" - Kool A.D.,
| 2012
| redisman wrote:
| > shouldn't have taken vc funding
|
| Classic case of this would've been great if the were
| fundamentally completely different people. I'd imagine they
| loved the tens of millions of dollars valuations and easy money
| and everything they got to do with it.
| duxup wrote:
| >shouldn't have taken vc funding
|
| That was my first thought too. The whole idea seems great, but
| more as a community project or just smaller slower company. Not
| sure you can make Genius into something that justifies hoping
| for massive returns.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| It's a reinvention of the hyperlink where they own the
| hyperlink, and if it had gotten enough traction who knows
| what they could have accomplished. I mean, Facebook was just
| a reinvention of the blog or webrings where Facebook owns the
| webring, right? I think it could have worked.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Facebook was just a reinvention of MySpace with was a
| reinvention of Friendster.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yeah this is a great example of a company that would have
| benefited from staying small and playing the long game. There's
| not a clear path to make money off of annotating song lyrics
| (or anything) so it seemed in their benefit to stretch out
| their lifespan instead of burning out chasing fast growth.
| duxup wrote:
| >Genius, a Brooklyn-based company that got its start providing
| context for rap lyrics
|
| I'm kind of sad I only just now (as far as I know) became aware
| of this.
|
| Then I wonder how many people who don't know / care to know the
| context of such things?
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| If you google ANY SONG, Genius will be a top 3 result. Their
| SEO is very good.
| jerrre wrote:
| A little too good even [1], they were deranked for some
| time...
|
| [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/6x7kzr/heres-why-rap-
| genius-...
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah it's very possible I've used their site ... just not
| noticed.
| antidaily wrote:
| Douchebags gonna douchebag.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Note that this is _not_ the MIT Media Lab, which _could_ have
| been an interesting scenario (IMO), but rather a media holding
| company.
| cadr wrote:
| My brain definitely boggled when I read the headline.
| neilv wrote:
| Mine, too.
|
| And the company appending "AI" to the name doesn't that help
| much, given that the original Media Lab was co-founded by
| Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the general field of
| AI. The Media Lab was also where Minsky continued to work on
| AI until he passed, not that long ago.
|
| (Disclosure: Am alum of the Media Lab, from many years ago,
| and this "branding confusion in the market" doesn't affect me
| like it might some people currently there.)
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| This is one area where copyright law feels just so out of touch.
| Musicians make money from their music, not printouts of their
| lyrics. It just feels different here. We have an exception for
| trademark when it comes to satire, we should have a similar
| exception when it comes to lyrics to songs for personal use. For
| example, CocaCola using lyrics as part of a commercial I
| understand the licensing angle. But when it comes to a site like
| Genius where the primary use is by fans trying to understand what
| was said and why it just feels wrong to stop.
| ThrowAwayCause wrote:
| I'm happy to see this company go out of business (yes, an $80M
| sale so VC bros can have a tax write-off is effectively going out
| of business).
|
| For anyone who had the pleasure of working with these f _ckers,
| you have to be smiling today.
|
| There's not a single interaction with this company that I had
| that was good. They were arrogant. They were insulting. They were
| condescending. Not just to me, but to everyone in my company that
| worked with them. More than once I had to listen to one of their
| founders yell at me on the phone (this was the founder who
| boasted about stealing from Whole Foods).
|
| Their account was the one account that got passed around like a
| hot potato. Nobody wanted to work with these a*holes.
|
| If anyone else had experiences like this with the Genius crew,
| feel free to share.
|
| Good riddance!_
| [deleted]
| skizm wrote:
| Didn't they get blacklisted from Google results for some sort of
| dark / spammy SEO scheme a while back? I assumed that was the
| death blow for these guys. Or did they somehow workout a deal
| that let them come back? I stopped keeping track.
| milkthefat wrote:
| I believe they did an encoding(Morse code or something) in the
| lyrics to prove google was using them verbatim.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| There was also the whole thing where Google stole all their
| lyrics data to power Knowledge Graph without paying them. Hard
| to sustain a business when goliath steals all your crud.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/genius-we-caught-google-red-hande...
|
| Then they lost the lawsuit to some nonsensical bull because
| technically the lyrics of someone else's song can't be
| copyrighted by them. But nonetheless, all the work they did had
| been stolen by the search engine people would normally use to
| find them. Hard to survive as a business in that environment.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| Didn't they get accused of doing the same thing?
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/6wnp4r/an-annotated-
| intervie...
| klllllllz wrote:
| Yeah, I remembered this as well. I always thought this is why
| they changed from rapgenius to genius
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
| ch33zer wrote:
| Is medialab.ai that sketchy company that just throws ads on the
| things it buys then let's them rot? What are they hoping to get
| from this?
| nemo44x wrote:
| More than $80m in profit from throwing ads on the rot.
| wombat-man wrote:
| These guys threw some fun parties in Brooklyn back in the day.
| They had talks from some notable engineers, had some good swag
| and an open bar.
|
| I applied but withdrew from the process when they told me that
| for the final round I'd have to present some interesting code I
| wrote to the engineering team. Everything significant/interesting
| I've done is proprietary. I didn't think I could whip something
| up in a few days.
|
| They let go of their aspirations to annotate the internet a while
| back I think. The internet is just too dynamic. I guess they had
| a lot of pressure from VCs to rapidly grow use cases and their
| user base.
|
| Anyway, RIP.
| PhilipA wrote:
| If the company was bootstrapped it could just have kept running
| and creating profits. Many business can create value in the
| world, but who are not VC material. Unfortunately the people
| behind was hitting for the fences and missed, instead of playing
| it more safe.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| I don't think this model is bootstrap-able. It's pretty much a
| social media play, which requires lots of burn to acquire first
| cohort of users.
|
| My friend bootstrapped a genius for books competitor with a
| subscription model and it was really difficult to grow. It's
| hard to build value based on network effects with subscription
| model.
| antoinec wrote:
| This is assuming that they could have created profits early
| enough to support them, which might not have been the case
| (then maybe it means that this shouldn't have been a business
| at all, but that's another question...)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| But would they have been able to pay the licensing for all
| those lyrics if they didn't have investors?
| brianwawok wrote:
| Bootstrapping has an opportunity cost that a lot of people
| gloss over, wages you could have made at a BigCo for years.
| Even if you are "successful" you still could be millions in the
| hole vs working at FAANG.
|
| Source: am a bootstrapper
| acdha wrote:
| This is true but I think there's also a question about the
| difference between VC as in huge amounts of money trying to
| build the next unicorn versus traditional business startup
| loan levels. I think a lot of startups would be better
| getting _some_ investment but with a target valuation in the
| millions rather than billions range. The founders can still
| do well in that range but they won't have hundreds of
| employees and expensive offices in NYC.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Right, you can do this to some extent with midwest angel /
| VC. If you stay out of coastal VC, you can a bit more
| modest, but the trend for even midwest VC seems to be
| pushing for unicorns lately...
| john_yaya wrote:
| Seems like bootstrapping isn't just about the money for many
| bootstrappers, perhaps including you. There's a type of
| person who would much rather grind out $150K ARR at something
| they create and own than pull down $450K/yr at Netflix.
| [deleted]
| dannyw wrote:
| That's contextual. For example, as someone living outside the
| USA with no immigration pathways, I simply can't get a FAANG
| salary.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Very true, so you would compare it to the <best job you
| could get>. But simply saying "It's such a bad idea to take
| VC money, just bootstrap" is too simple of a statement.
| Again, I say this as a bootstrapper.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Sure, but they also will have a much more difficult time
| getting the type of VC money American startups get.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| A bootstrapper doesn't need that.
| trynewideas wrote:
| Nothing to add, except I unironically love seeing this written
| on Hacker News on a story about a YC company.
|
| Genius should've stayed a bootstrapped side project, but the
| founders got swept up in VC culture via YC and convinced
| themselves they were making a world-changing product.
| https://genius.com/Tom-lehman-how-rap-genius-raised-s18m-in-...
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