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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.

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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.

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