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Comment by devanti | Hacker News Reader

If RG thinks they're so great (and all the bandwagoners on HN), then they should prove it by playing fairly.

My suspicion is that the vast majority of people who search for lyrics don't care about song meanings or annotations. Azlyrics does just fine, which is why they've always been at the top. If people wanted song meanings they would search for song meanings.

My theory is that RG wasn't able to grow as fast as they hoped and have to resort to these methods. How else can RG justify a $15 million investment? Their biggest competitor, songmeanings.com, is bootstrapped with only a couple employees, which shows the true market size of the song meanings / annotations market.

Remember that most consumers want things that are insanely simple and give them immediate satisfaction. I'm not surprised that most people on HN think otherwise as they tend to be deeper thinkers than the average consumer.

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The difference between RG and songmeanings, and really any other lyrics website in existence, is the quality of the annotations. My habit of listening to rap has changed quite dramatically since I have discovered RG - I don't have to speculate about what a line might mean, because now there's a whole community of people who love rap collate their collective wisdom and tell you what it means. The verified annotations are also amazing...I mean seriously, what other site has artists themselves explaining what they meant for their own songs? I think the $15 million can be justified if you look at their long-term plans. They've built a model with rap and now they're expanding onto rock, pop and poetry. I see it this way: the sell for RG is for their whole slew of websites to become the wikipedia for literary/artistic interpretation, a position they have already locked down with rap. Whether that is worth $15 million is of course up to you, but it looks like it was worth it to some big name investors.

Ok cool. So RG is way better than songmeanings.

That doesn't change the size of the market.

That is, unless you think the quality or features are so good that it will increase the size of the market. In that sense, I don't think RG is groundbreaking enough IMO.

Songmeanings has been around for over a decade. If the market demand was really there ($15mm investment worth), they would naturally gotten some funding, or enough revenue, to improve their product and soak the $ potential out of the market.

We've been approached a handful of times for funding as well as potential acquisitions into larger networks/sites throughout the years. However, the logistics have never made much sense, if I am being honest, so we've always declined.

Currently we are talking to a group which is very promising. Can't say much more, but hopefully we can in the near future.

Their ambition isn't limited to the song meanings / annotations market. They wouldn't have raised $15m on that. Look at how they're branching out. PoetryGenius, NewsGenius, etc. They want to annotate the world's information.

That's a huge market and with RG's excellent execution so far (everyone has missteps - remember that), it warrants a $15m bet.

That could be their goal, but it's a lot easier said than done, especially in markets that haven't been executed before.

For example, Rdio tried to do Vdio with video and look how that turned out.

Off the top of my head, I can't even think of one company that expanded to different categories successfully. It's difficult and really rare.

Everything's easier said than done...

I can. Here are three: Salesforce. Amazon. Google.

Those companies were making a lot of revenue in a huge market before they expanded. It's comparing apples to oranges.

I thought annotations were just a way to sidestep paying licensing on the lyrics.

Very well written.

I think if anything, the fact that they are funded and need to produce positive ROI for their investment creates incentive to "grow at all costs". However, the cost has been too great.

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