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.
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.
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
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.
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.