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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
