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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

I actually like their product but wonder if they just haven't recovered from this: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no.... If they were higher up when a user searches Google for "lyrics" during their critical growth phase they might have had the growth to keep their engineering going strong. Kind of reminds me of Foursquare right now.

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Anecdotally, despite the Google incident and their name change, they're still the place I look for lyrics having used them twice this week alone. That said, I haven't the faintest idea about their revenue strategies and how those might work for them, but I wish them well. I think they did the lyrics thing better than anyone previously and often find myself wondering why I can't have it integrated with, say, Google Music and such

Indeed, browsing song lyrics seems more like a feature than a product.

Well, the product is supposed to be the annotation system. The lyrics were just an initial use of it.

I think they came up with that whole explanation after the fact, as evidenced by the fact they never really followed through on building an actual system that could be used in the varied ways they described

Also evidenced by the fact that they were initially called Rap Genius

They had a few things, but not a complete system like they did for lyrics:

An example: https://genius.com/Barack-obama-state-of-the-union-2016-anno...

> wondering why I can't have it integrated with, say, Google Music and such

It is integrated with Spotify although it seems to pop-up randomly for me. I've never figured out why some songs show info from Genius or how I'd get to it intentionally if I wanted to (but I admit I haven't really tried).

It's still my go-to as well. I really appreciated the idea, but it just seemed to drown in a sea of lyrics sites, and the general fact that most people seem to be disinterested in spending nay real time on lyrics.

It's a bit different from Genius, but I really like bilebili's annotation system.

I don't think it has anything to do with their engineering. Essentially the global annotation product failed, so they doubled down on rap and turned into a media company. As an early fan of the product, I'm still not sure how to feel about all this, though admittedly you could see it coming even from the outside over the past 6-12 months.

It's always been a little confusing to me how annotation could be a defensible product. A large and active user base is, of course, inherently defensible, but the user base of people who will make animated GIFs to explain Jay-Z lyrics has very little to do with the user base you want to explain the AHCA.

I like the idea of annotation and I even sort of like Genius's implementation of annotation. There's a pretty decent annotation of Gatsby on the site. Virtually every line of The Waste Land has a good annotation there too. But, not to put too fine a point on it, this stuff all seems like, from a platform perspective, something Dustin Curtis could have built solo.

If you could turn the whole web into a vibrant, engaged, participatory community and do it all on your platform, then suddenly you're rivaling Facebook. That's a $100B business right there.

It's just that annotations, by themselves, fail to do that. Their VCs must've been betting either on some new killer feature that would come out, or that users would react to the existing annotation product differently than they did. For a VC, though, "could rival Facebook" is often more important than "has a small chance of doing so".

Betting that the rapid growth and dominance in rap could be reproduced across other verticals.

And that annotations could eventually be the successor to eg Disqus across the web, as well a new type of social network.

I think the world's information would be so much richer if it had played out. I'm still bullish on annotation tools for empowering knowledge.

I don't think the userbases are really that fragmented. The popularity of meme annotations slowly faded away to more quality comments and official annotations from rappers, producers, etc. Personally, I annotated rap songs, tech news, as well as "boring" documents.

But the annotations community outside of rap songs didn't take off in the same way.

I think its because outside of rap there isnt many songs with the lyrical density and complexity required for anotations to work. Even most rap songs are very up front about what they are talking about.

Their only other major play is annotating things like scientific papers but I cant see the market for that being big enough to make money.

Scientific papers is actually the very first market I had in mind when Genius launched as at the time I was doing research and ramping up on image processing / computer vision literature. There'd be so much value in having annotations on research papers to speed up that process.

Google fucked them hard. But they kept their engineering going for many years afterwards, and their business model (from what I can tell) involved partnerships with media companies like newspapers, which are a channel for interactions that aren't mediated by Google.

Google punished them appropriately. They fucked themselves.

I think Google fucked them hard just to prove a point.

99% of lyrics sites are utter trash littered with popups, redirects and extremely obnoxious ads. Genius was the first lyrics site I ever saw that broke that mold.

Sure, they also broke Google's arbitrary rules, but they had a better product that genuinely deserved to be at the top of the rankings. I still wince when I click on a link to any other lyrics site.

I worked for a pre-Genius lyrics service [1] with a website that also broke that mold, at least in my opinion. We didn't have very many ads, and the site design was simpler and far less spammy than most lyrics websites were at the time, probably because the website was just a hook to get people to install their mobile apps.

The lyrics licensing industry is absolutely brutal, and I will be pleasantly surprised if anyone that isn't owned by a music publisher is able to succeed in this market.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TuneWiki

> It was simpler and far less spammy than most lyrics websites were at the time, probably because the website was just a hook to get people to install their mobile apps.

> arbitrary rules

How on earth were the rules arbitrary? These guys were exploiting and abusing backlinks to boost their page rank.

How long till the same thing happens to Pintrest who spam google image search results then don't follow through with the actual image and instead lock you off from all the content with a signup window.

Hopefully not long

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