Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M | Hacker News Reader

Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M

bloombergquint.com

265 pointscytosine232 comments

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

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.

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.

Check out genius on a mobile browser. It's literally unusable. Rapgenius was great but its decline was very obvious.

Seems to work fine for me. What exactly makes it unusable?

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.

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.

It's still broken for me half the time. And ad-blocker does help.

That's funny because I saw that too and they came off as charlatans to me.

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."

Awwww, I forgot about this album. Gonna spend all day relistening.

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.

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.

I'd be happy if they just consistently got the lyrics right.

It's amazing how all lyrics websites have the same incorrect lyrics to so many songs. It's like a microcosm of how the whole world works.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

This video from techcrunch disrupt kind of showed why the original leadership may have had issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

Every time this comes up, people fail to realize that it was a shtick designed to generate hype. Their platform at the time (Rap Genius) primarily catered to annotation of rap and hip-hop lyrics, so (imho) the shtick fit.

I dare say was even funny at times, especially when contrast to the tone of most startups back then espousing generic faux-humble feel-good bullshit vibes.

It was clearly more than a performance given the things that led up to several of the founders getting fired.

I try not to judge the guy too hard, considering:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3021564/how-a-brain-tumor-made-t...

https://jewishjournal.com/culture/health/240270/how-a-second...

> Moghadam says his brain tumor has given a renewed vigor to his community building efforts. “I think this is going to be the ‘Facebook of Cryptocurrency’ – our President Sam Kazemian is known as the ‘Persian Zuck’ – he’s going to make the internet better by giving everyone a cryptocurrency stake.”

> Moghadam believes in God and says his two brain tumors give his companies their Jewish, philosophical roots. “Sam (Kazemian) is actually one-sixteenth Jewish and 15/16ths Muslim – he is a special Persian breed. I think knowledge projects and social networks are a lot like the Talmud – we are all using the internet to make people smarter.”

Wait... what?

As you can see, he doesn’t take himself seriously—most of the time.

What’s more puzzling really is his appearance on Who is America?[0]

Everyone of course delighted in portraying Mahbod as a douchebag tech bro who was easily fooled, proceeding vilify him further. At the time that was filmed, he was likely already experiencing his second brain tumor that would require surgical removal just weeks after the air date of the episode.

I’ve always been a fan of Sacha, but you’d think they would’ve dug into the dude’s past a bit more before deciding to crucify him.

[0] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a22709637/sacha-bar...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

If you are capable of making this post, you are capable of self hosting rails on something closer to the metal.

Genius's investigation and analysis of Heroku's load balancing claims vs their actual practices was anything but "dickish", and it wasn't a "fight".

They produced an intelligent, thorough, and fair exposè of poor engineering practices by Heroku which were otherwise not documented (or worse, misleadingly documented), and which also benefited Heroku financially, since users would have to purchase many more dynos to get the expected performance - up to 50 times more if I recall correctly.

Genius didn't have to share any of their analysis. They could have simply shown it to Heroku and probably received a bunch of "hush" benefits to forget about the whole thing. The fact they bothered to polish it and open source it allowed others to benefit from their work and meant that even 8 years' later, someone like me can better plan hosting requirements and avoid falling into the trap they did.

Yes, Heroku's load balancing works the same way to this day, resulting in much higher costs to medium-large apps as well as huge degradations to end user experience as some users will randomly be routed to dynos with long queues despite others being completely idle! This is a huge waste of energy and bad for the environment too.

As a heavy Heroku user, I'm incredibly grateful for Genius's work on this issue!

That’s one interpretation of the events, motivations, and hypothetical alternative situations.

Or it’s simply that Heroku didn’t provide customers great visibility into a the issue at hand, that the best-in-class at the time 3rd party add-on that gave that visibility was misleading, and that architectural changes required to support a broader set of languages in a more distributed fashion introduced a change in behaviour that was not documented. The engineering best practice continues to be the same, which is why it is unchanged 8 years later: push long-running requests into an async flow. It’s both more scalable and more durable.

It's a problem for any application on Heroku that uses more than a single web dyno (i.e. any software other than tiny applications), and certainly not limited to applications with long-running requests.

Consider Genius's checkout analogy: busy markets are efficient because customers sort themselves into the shortest queues. If customers were randomly allocated queues, some customers will wait in lengthy queues while others queues remain empty!

Critically, the same logic holds whether customers have lots of items (long-running requests), or very few items - one is slightly worse, but customers are still waiting unnecessarily while other queues are free to be used (but aren't).

So it's a problem even for applications with no long-running requests. Suppose a user's request falls in a queue with 10 users being served first, while other queues are idle, also assume requests are reasonably fast - 3000ms - then you still have to wait 33 seconds (!!) for the "3000ms" request to be served (!!) - I think that will error because heroku times out requests at 30000ms. This is a disaster for UX.

Someone made a simulation to show how incredibly wasteful it is: https://gist.github.com/toddwschneider/4947326

Note that while it would be great for it to be improved, I in no way demand/expect that, I just don't think it's fair that Genius aren't given credit for their analysis - analysis that Heroku ought to have provided. It shouldn't have been Genius or other customers to expose that Heroku had misguided them, even if it happened accidentally and without intent.

I agree on most of this. My biggest disappointment is Heroku not implementing a reasonable form of autoscaling to mitigate the worst aspects of this if it occurs. Though I’d still contend that for a site like Rap Genius at the time, 3000ms server response times were still wholly unsatisfactory and they needed to get it under 100ms. Because the likelihood of this occurring compounds significantly in proportion to request time _and_ request volume. They knew what the required solution was.

The original “intelligent” routing was possible because the router effectively had a single shared state to track all these things which was also a single point of failure. And because the state of the art of web servers for Ruby back when it was implemented was Mongrel and it was single threaded.

Add in support for nodejs (and other multi-threaded languages to soon follow) and suddenly each dyno can process multiple request concurrently and the request accounting isn’t as valuable. Make the router more fault tolerant and the overhead in trying to manage that accounting at scale becomes almost impossible without adding significant overhead to every customer request and degrading performance for everyone.

I bristle when people seem to think there was some nefarious revenue incentive from Heroku here. They were well reasoned platform changes to improve availability and increase performance for more efficient languages. In the process the marketing got disconnected from the implementation.

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.

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

Hypothesis is going strong. They have smart people working on it, it's fully open source with open APIs and data available over anonymous RSS, the culture is nothing like rap/bro culture, and the founder is independently wealthy from winning the startup lottery in a past life and seems to be running the thing as a passion project no matter how much it makes. (Their main commercial play right now is selling higher ed. on the idea of using Hypothes.is for scholarly criticism.)

See "Notes for an Annotation SDK" from a couple weeks ago <https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/09/03/notes-for-an-annotation...>

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/

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?

Do the bands have the rights to the lyrics?

It's either them or their record company, or maybe a songwriter.

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.

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.

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.

Wouldn't that be a reason for Genius to try to drive some more value for the bands?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not sure how you think you have the standing to tell me my own experience of shopping on Amazon just never happened. Regardless, that's a sign to me that further dialog will not be productive.

What's in it for them? Why would they care about people mangling their lyrics?

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.

I was in touring bands for years, and I didn't care if anyone ever read my lyrics, or if they misunderstood them.

There are artists who supply official annotations and additional insight into their lyrics. Example: https://genius.com/4196571?

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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

I still have my "Quora Top Writer 2013" fleece jacket though.

So there's that.

Wow, I think I do too! Definitely a quality swag item. Never wore it in public, though.

I guess you haven't had a wikipedia admin tell you "you're doing it wrong" yet, then. They are quite the slanted and tiny authoritarian bunch over there.

I am a retired Wikipdedia editor and admin. Not sure what the current experience is like, but back in my day I didn't have much beef. Most people have no idea how much crap people try to put into Wikipedia on a daily basis. It's also legitimately a very complicated place. So I can believe a lot of novices walk away with an opinion like yours, in that the gap between "what Wikipedia needs" and "what J Random Editor wants to put in" is often miles apart.

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.

I also got an editor role for annotating an album I liked. Mahbod added me as a friend on Facebook and I got access to their social media. I didn't keep it up for long but I think someone tweeted something bad for PR not much later.

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.

> That sounds great to me, anybody know what caused so much trouble?

They are competing with Wikipedia?

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_publications...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28551572

Fermat’s Library? Arxiv vanity?

> anybody know what caused so much trouble?

Removing the co-founder, who had so much passion for the business?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

$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.

“ 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.

Google/YouTube is built on other peoples' content...

Users must give youtube a permissive license to post videos. Not so for lyrics on Genius.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People forget that in 2004 there were several streaming video sites. They all disappeared because they featured copyrighted content.

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.

Movie clips and music videos are surely a double digit percent of youtube's views, not to mention other categories I may be missing.

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.

Nowadays. YouTube became big through users uploading pirated music to it.

> 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.

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.

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)

> 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/

> 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.

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...

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.

It’s expensive to license lyrics. CPM rates to display are far more than what typical ads bring in.

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.

> 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?

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?

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?

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).

shareholders would rather lose only half of their investment then all of it. It's quite possible for a company to sell at a shareholder loss.

And of course, some sheareholders lost their stakes in this sale.

> Because the company’s obligations to its preferred shareholders exceeded the sale price, investors won’t be paid out in full, according to a document reviewed by Bloomberg.

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.

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.

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.

It's irrational, sure. But it seems like a very human way of thinking. Anchoring is real.

> 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."

I skimmed it ;) But I did looked how much they raised on CrunchBase, seemed to be about equal of the sales price.

The thesis you have been hammering this tiresome thread is that a company can't possibly sell for less than the amount that's been invested in it (with the implication that buyers will then be willing to pay more than they would otherwise if it's what it takes to meet that number, which is just weird), and the very example you were discussing in fact disproves your thesis. So.

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.

>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.

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.

Facebook was just a reinvention of MySpace with was a reinvention of Friendster.

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.

> 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.

Spotify doesn't, and even for Apple Music lyrics are a somewhat recent addition afaik.

Spotify does, though not for all. And… those lyrics come from Genius, so yeah.

Source: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/lyrics/

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?

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

> 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.

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.

But would they have been able to pay the licensing for all those lyrics if they didn't have investors?

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

That's contextual. For example, as someone living outside the USA with no immigration pathways, I simply can't get a FAANG salary.

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.

Sure, but they also will have a much more difficult time getting the type of VC money American startups get.

A bootstrapper doesn't need that.

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.

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...

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.

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...)

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-...

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.

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?

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.

How is a song lyrics site worth any money? It was one of the most dot-com ideas ever.

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).

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...

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.

What if annotating things is just not that worthwhile a business?

> since it was so hyped and well funded

The funding comes from the hype. So all it takes is for the hype to be overblown for the whole thing to fall apart.

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.

Was at HackMIT during the same time frame. Can confirm that the only person from RapGenius present (pretty sure he was the founder or at least claimed to be) was as arrogant as can be and spoke only about how amazing his company was.

Pretty much nothing about inspiring the young professionals attending, which is not really in the spirit of Hackathons. I will say that as arrogant as his speech was, his was pretty much the only one I still remember to this day, so I guess it was effective if nothing else.

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.

I think this is a bug on Firefox, as my Firefox does the same behavior but works fine on Chrome based browsers.

More like poorly implemented user agent sniffing done by "Genius"

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.

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

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.

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.

Good to know you're moving towards putting the annotations back on the side, but please deploy that for Firefox users too.

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.

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.

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.

The entry for If by Rudyard Kipling warms my heart https://genius.com/1247142

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

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.

I was making a presentation on web bloat and was researching the extremes of content to container ratio. In this case its 1544 bytes for the poem vs 3 MB for the page (with uBlock).

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

It was a party/hustle from the beginning. These guys have a VICE-like ethos.

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”.

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.

> The product is significantly better than other lyric sites

And...how much are people willing to pay for (annotated or not) song lyrics?

The founders did a pretty funny (and cringeworthy) interview with TechCrunch in their early years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

they got trolled well by Sacha Baron Cohen on This is America too

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I believe they did an encoding(Morse code or something) in the lyrics to prove google was using them verbatim.

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.

Didn't they get accused of doing the same thing?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/6wnp4r/an-annotated-intervie...

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/

I recall Genius was hot, hot, hot way back when. Crazy that it was sold for less than 100M.

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.

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.

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.

I remember the days when the most obtrusive ad you'd see browsing the web was a paypal donation button

>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?

If you google ANY SONG, Genius will be a top 3 result. Their SEO is very good.

Yeah it's very possible I've used their site ... just not noticed.

A little too good even [1], they were deranked for some time...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/6x7kzr/heres-why-rap-genius-...

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?

More than $80m in profit from throwing ads on the rot.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Note that this is _not_ the MIT Media Lab, which _could_ have been an interesting scenario (IMO), but rather a media holding company.

My brain definitely boggled when I read the headline.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

You went to the wrong website, the right site is https://www.medialab.la/ not http://medialab.ai/

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!

I was wondering how an MIT research lab had 80 megabucks to buy a website

https://www.media.mit.edu/

I remember Ben Horowitz always promoting Rap Genius and using rap lyrics in his essays. It always seemed 'try hard' to me, Horowitz being an ultra wealthy white male. This was one investment I never understood.

It was an interesting idea but I never really found much reason to use it over OHHLA.

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.

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.

Well, there's still https://songmeanings.com/ but sadly the verse-by-verse annotation feature isn't there.

Should it be? Would verse-by-verse interpretations be valuable when the content is subjective?

Sad day. Love this talk from the co-founder Tom Lehman titled "Worse is Better" [1]

[1]: https://youtu.be/X45YY97FmL4

Tom is an incredibly smart guy. I'm excited to see what his next venture might be.

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.

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

i recall a top comment from a few years ago "Every time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is completely insane", and one of the Genius investors lurking here got genuinely offended, lol

edit: here it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8022414

Does anybody remember a Taiwanese computer brand called Genius? I remember they were everywhere once, and then disappeared equally fast.

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

They made mice originally, ISTR? I had one in the late 80s, bundled with a paint package called Dr Halo.

They also were among the first to sell handscanners.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulccjXS0wPk

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...

Well...that's the company that came to my mind when I read the headline? I didn't know there was another one.

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!

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.

Given all the hubbub and attention surrounding Genius, I’m surprised they’re not actually bigger than $80 million.

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 fckers, 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!

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