
Genius laid off a bunch of its engineers - artsandsci
http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/15/14924238/rap-genius-web-annotator-chrome-extension-news
======
jraines
The premise behind their big investment round was that they would take their
annotation tech to the rest of the web.

The only place I've personally seen it used is for people to snarkily mark-up
political op-eds.

It's a cool vision -- I wish I could see, for a given article, the best inline
comments or just those of people I find credible -- but it doesn't seem
scalable to the wide web, as there just aren't enough people willing to put
smart commentary on every article instead of just firing off a few tweets,
commenting on the article at an aggregator like reddit (which gives a signal
of which things are worth commenting on, and a built-in audience for the
commentary) or writing their own post.

~~~
pinaceae
How exactly were they pitching their actual business model? Any clue?

I get the annotation idea, but how the hell do you make significant money off
of it?

~~~
CPLX
1\. Have the "right kind" of founders, Ivy League, brash and exciting and
magnets for press. Also have the "right kind" of company, lots of coders and
claims of having an engineering culture.

2\. Have a somewhat successful user generated content site.

3\. Mutter some generalities about how we're "not just X man, we're like
totally X for the entire internet"

4\. ??

5\. Profit

~~~
bogomipz
>"Have the "right kind" of founders, Ivy League, brash and exciting and
magnets for press."

I found their "right kind" to be cringe worthy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo)

~~~
myroon5
The founder on the right seemed borderline drunk.

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Yhippa
I actually like their product but wonder if they just haven't recovered from
this: [https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-
no...](https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-seo-
genius-lyric-site-fails-to-recover-traffic-after-google-penalty). 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.

~~~
27182818284
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

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

~~~
mason55
Well, the product is supposed to be the annotation system. The lyrics were
just an initial use of it.

~~~
trustfundbaby
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

~~~
madeofpalk
Also evidenced by the fact that they were initially called _Rap_ Genius

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tarr11
Web annotation standards should not be a proprietary format, owned by a
private company.

Not sure if this W3C spec[1] is in the right direction, but at least it's an
open standard.

Personally, I liked the WebMention[2] model better (rel="webmention"), where
you mark up HTML. But it would require someone to take up the banner and make
it easy to distribute and deploy.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-
model/](https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/)

[2] [https://webmention.net/draft/](https://webmention.net/draft/)

~~~
koolba
That first line is the reason something like this is doomed to fail. The
second is that the people who would actually use annotations for something
constructive are greatly outnumbered by people who will use it to post the
same comment spam we see in regular comment sections. Without that being
solved this is just another spam delivery vector.

~~~
tarr11
I'd imagine you could start by whitelisting domains. This wouldn't help
commercial sites but if you "followed" a domain it would be no worse than
Twitter notifications.

~~~
jerf
If you have to start whitelisting participants, you have a very hard time
creating a critical mass across the internet.

Annotation in a weird way is even harder than a "boil the ocean" problem; you
have to have the _exact right_ number of participants, across all the enormous
complexity of the Internet, or at least, a very huge chunk of it. If you have
nobody on some page, the annotation system is useless, and if you have
thousands of people pounding away at the same page, it's pretty useless too.
You have to hit this window of reliably having just the right number of users
on a page, on an Internet that intrinsically tends towards power law page
viewing, somehow across the entire Internet. After ~18 years of watching the
space, I simply believe the entire vision is unsolvably flawed, especially in
the presence of successful link aggregation and commentary sites.

~~~
jimcsharp
It seems like something that should be constrained to social network circles.
It might be useful to post graffiti on any site on the Internet - within my
group of friends.

~~~
jerf
Unless your friends are very, very, _very_ similarly minded, that falls under
the "everywhere you go, nobody is there" class, and you quickly stop using it
in favor of some sort of centralized comment stream like a chat channel or
Facebook posts.

The power-law distribution of web pages wreaks havoc on almost any attempt to
distribute people well here. Your solution basically would make it so the
annotation works OK on only those pages that are on the high end of the local
power law distribution, but that is probably fewer pages than you might think
as you'd all have different long tails.

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soyiuz
Let's not forget the elephant in the room: [Rap] Genius rose to popularity by
flagrant copyright infringement. They were forced to settle with music
publishers in 2014, after receiving a generous round of funding (in the
millions). See [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-
genius...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius-
website-agrees-to-license-with-music-publishers.html?_r=0).

Around the same time they were pitching colleges for classroom use, but were
embarrassingly unprepared to address the copyright problem. Their "platform"
involved republishing texts to which they had no rights. They did not even
have a good story about claims on student (author) contributions. Who owns the
annotations? They had no coherent answer during a demo at my uni. We passed.

It is beyond me as to how smart investors threw money at such incompetence.

~~~
swyman
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly (IANAL) but that article left me thinking the
mistake was signing the original deal with Sony. Does fair use actually cover
what the platform did at at the time?

~~~
soyiuz
In my reading of the law they clearly broke fair use. According to the letter
of the law, factors in consideration of fair use include:

1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of
the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in
relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use
upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
([https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107](https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107))

Rap genius was/is a for profit corp and they reproduced the copyrighted work
in full, on their own servers. I don't see how they could argue fair use. In
addition, their use is arguably non transformative, in that they leave the
original intact.

The writing was on the wall, Sony deal or not. It was just a question of
copyright holders noticing/acting on the violation. The initial round with
Anderssen Horowitz for 15 million in 2014 prompted swift response.

~~~
syrrim
Were I a lawyer I would argue that they are covered under points (1) and (4).
For (1), even though they aren't nonprofit, they aren't using the work
directly to gain profit. Rather, they are using it as a base on which to
annotate. For (4), I would argue that the primary market for lyrics is not the
lyrics themselves, but instead productions of those lyrics in song form. This
can be seen by the fact that any number of websites reproduce them at little
cost.

I don't know if this is sufficient grounds to argue fair use, but it is clear
that the case is not cut-and-dry.

~~~
danso
But if the effect of RapGenius's hosting of lyrics led to them being the first
results for all searches of lyrics, whether the lyrics were significantly
transformed or not, it could be argued that they are directly profiting from
unfair use of those lyrics. Else, what would stop any site from copying and
republishing any material wholesale and claiming that users come to the site
to comment via Disqus?

~~~
soyiuz
Yes. Note that direct or indirect is not in the language of the guidelines.
copyright.gov says:

"Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes: Courts look at how
the party claiming fair use is using the copyrighted work, and are more likely
to find that nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses are fair. "

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legitster
If you enjoy Hip-Hop or any other lyrically dense music, Genius is absolutely
the best place to dig deeper and enjoy it. But they spent a ton of time and
effort to branch out to other genres, and to be honest, there is almost
nothing gained there.

~~~
k__
I have a bit of confirmation bias here.

I never found most hip-hop lyrics being so deep that hey need some annotations
for explanation.

Then it felt like very far fetched to me that people who considered annotating
hip-hop lyrics now want to "annotate the world".

And now they can't live up to their promises, which perfectly fits in my,
probably wrong, model of hip-hop culture in general.

~~~
sanswork
It's not about the lyrics being deep almost no lyrics in any popular music are
deep except in a im14andthisisdeep sense. It's usually about not understanding
regional slang or inside jokes.

For example I really like grime but I haven't lived in England for over a
decade so I have no clue what a lot of their references mean when I first hear
them because I never hear them in my day to day. Genius helps with that and a
lot of other cases.

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dpflan
Mainly related to web annotation: does anyone here use Hypothes.is? (its goal
to do web annotation correctly, versus Genius' desire to do the same
(eventually, right?))

([https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-
standard/](https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/))

~~~
johnpettus
climatefeedback.org is a good implementation of Hypothes.is They get
scientists to check climate-related articles. Check them out and support them
if you can. Good people doing good work.

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exogeny
Easy lesson here: don't raise a ton of money just because you can. The
valuation that was set and the terms that come with it limit their exits by an
inordinate degree, and I don't imagine for a second their plans required the
amount of capital they raised.

Also, if you're an LP of a16z, don't let Horowitz waste $40m just because he
wants to hang out with rappers.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Why does he even want to hang out with rappers? The majority of them sell
delusion.

------
walshemj
Does any one think that naming the individuals in this way is a kind'a of dick
move (to quote Dean Winchester).

It's going to impact their bargaining position for a new gig

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madamelic
Yeah, I follow one of their engineers on Twitter. She seemed like totally
killer, someone any company would kill to have.

Apparently Genius didn't think so.

~~~
draw_down
There are other reasons for letting people go than poor performance. Sadly.

~~~
madamelic
I guess they decided against being a tech company and decided to go full media
company where tech is a cost center and engineers are replaceable.

I think the article hinted at that.

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lowglow
I never really thought Genius was cool until I saw eminem was annotating his
own songs. That was pretty neat.

~~~
TheGRS
I never heard of Genius until I got into listening to Hamilton a few months
ago. Its a great resource for getting historical explanations for the dense
lyrics of the songs and even Miranda himself wrote a lot of the snippets. Its
the only thing I've used Genius for so far.

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microcolonel
I put some transliterations and metadata on Genius.com and I think it's the
best lyric site on the internet. They just need to figure out how to stay
alive and grow the catalogue further, test things which don't cost them
millions of dollars to fail at.

~~~
microcolonel
I think it'll be a shame if they suddenly stop being a well-organized lyrics
site and focus on their lame propaganda feed instead.

Maybe they could donate the lyrics metadata to the public domain.

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pnathan
They are the best lyrics site on the net, period. The annotations are... not
always that great.

The annotations that journalists do on speeches can be super useful.

But in general... I'd like to have a portable system to annotate PDFs,
textfiles, etc. _Local_ files. Take notes and cross-link against multiple
files & multiple notes.

I've been making notes sporadically for a decade about such a thing, with
occasional bits of code that don't really solve the problem. Currently I'm
playing with a neo4j backed proto-prototype. :: shrug ::

~~~
mythrwy
It isn't local but something like this?

[https://hypothes.is/](https://hypothes.is/)

[http://docdrop.org/](http://docdrop.org/)

~~~
pnathan
Yeah, those are sibling ideas, I think.

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stevebmark
There is no way that Genius ever can, nor ever will, achieve their vision.
This is a money pit funding overgrown children from day one, and nothing else.
This is throwing money at an idea before it's proven, and trying to force an
idea no one wants on people. It's an embarrassment of the valley.

~~~
johnpettus
I talked to a VC who saw their original pitch. Said it was the fastest growth
curve he's seen in his career. That was back when they were RapGenius.

~~~
stevebmark
I'm assuming "growth" meant meaningless users just writing comments, and it
was pitched as DAUs convertible to profit. If my assumption is correct this
sounds like fraud to me.

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edoceo
Relevant reddit
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/5zncj2/all_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/5zncj2/all_of_the_websites_for_finding_lyrics_look_like/)

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tzz
What contributed the most to kill their business is that now Google displays
lyric results inline. Your are in great risk if Google can just replace your
business by displaying it inline when people are searching.

~~~
stagbeetle
There's a niche of people who want to know the backstory of the lyrics.

Especially for more symbol-liberal artists like Bowie.

And rap like Norf Norf.

------
xatan_dank
This doesn't come as any surprise to me. Over the years, I haven't found
Genius to be significantly better at annotating lyrics than any of it's
competitors. Genius takes longer to load and doesn't provide any more value in
its annotations than does azlyrics, youtube comments, facebook, reddit, or
anywhere else discussions are occurring. A lot of the time, its annotations
are just straight up wrong or embarrassingly shallow, and attracting actual
artists to write about their own lyrics didn't excite me. Furthermore, the
lyrics themselves are often wrong.

The reason I'm complaining about this isn't to be a wet blanket- I just can't
believe this service got the amount of funding it did. If their musical
annotations are so cringeworthy and poor, what made investors think they could
annotate other websites so well that a $58.9 million dollar investment would
produce any reasonable return?

Genius reminds me quite a lot of last.fm in terms of what kind of service it
was and how well it has fared as time has progressed. Both were reasonable
ideas to begin with, but is there any reason these ideas needed millions of
dollars in funding to operate? I am really getting the impression that these
tech VC's are just out of ideas and are consistently trying to monetize
internet toys which in reality should remain small web services for dedicated
user-developer types.

~~~
fav_collector
do they have competitors? Other lyrics sites look and feel like static html
sites from the early 2000's

~~~
dragonwriter
> do they have competitors? Other lyrics sites look and feel like static html
> sites from the early 2000's

If I'm looking for song lyrics, and not some collaborative social information-
exchange medium, then that's exactly what I want it to look like (and pretty
much be.)

Genius is slow loading and slow scrolling and has bigger ad blocks than most
lyrics sites. If I'm not specifically looking for annotations rather than mere
lyrics, it's _strictly worse_ Tha the competition.

~~~
sparky_z
Those aren't really competitors, though. At least not in the spirit of the op
comment.

> I haven't found Genius to be significantly better _at annotating lyrics_
> than any of it's competitors

So again, what competitors are they talking about?

~~~
Spoom
Since when was annotating lyrics a competitive business?

Edit: Since I've been downvoted at least once, I want to clarify. I'm unsure
what monetary value can be extracted from the ability to annotate third party
websites, or in this case, specifically, lyrics. As others have mentioned, if
I want lyrics, I typically just want the lyrics, as uncomplicated as possible.
Perhaps I'm missing something.

~~~
sparky_z
That's the point fav_collector and I are making. What competitors? xatan_dark
seems to think they have some.

~~~
xatan_dank
I should have been more specific- I meant to refer to their competitors in the
analysis of lyrics, not just annotation. For this purpose, I feel that Genius
is overall quite poor and that there are much better discussion boards and
services.

With regards to annotation specifically, songfacts and lyricsmode are
competitors in that they support the same kind of annotation Genius does. In
this sense, they are certainly competitors, though Genius has far more
annotations and is winning the competition.

My main point about the failure of Genius is that it's Jedi mind tricked
people into thinking annotation, and not just annotation in general but
Genius' specific implementation of it, is the 'best' way to discover the
'objective' meaning of individual songs. There is no objective meaning and
Genius' annotation feature is hardly as powerful as people give it credit for.
Genius is just a discussion board with annotations enabled- another iteration
of the many discussion boards which VC's have foolishly pumped tons of money
into and not received a payout from.

------
angry_napkin
Just because you can raise money doesn't mean you should. I find video
extremely distracting on a daily basis and avoid it at all costs. You may not
feel the same.

------
bronson
They're pivoting to Pop-Up Video?

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sjg007
Who are their customers?

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sfjailbird
I predicted Genius' certain doom at the time of their funding and got heckled
by Marc Andreesen:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531937)

~~~
spenrose
"Nope. We don't do those. It's the real deal. One of the fastest growing
consumer properties of all time with huge market opportunity." is not
heckling.

~~~
tptacek
"Good luck in jail" sure is.

~~~
mattmanser
It's an innocent joke about his username.

~~~
tptacek
I don't think anyone said it was a capital crime. I believe the word used was
"heckling".

~~~
spenrose
My mistake.

------
draw_down
Annotating other web pages was probably never going to work as a VC-backed
business, but it was surprisingly useful.

~~~
jordanb
That's true of so many things getting funded in SV today. And a bigger problem
than SV wasting money is that these SV backed companies can cut off the air
supply for more sustainable bootstrapped businesses in the same space.

I could actually see SV being an impediment to innovation by "salting the
fields" in so many product categories with hugely overfunded companies that
will eventually flame out.

~~~
xatan_dank
This is exactly what I've been thinking, thanks for sharing. For example, I've
been so angry at how bad YouTube has gotten as of late and I feel that it's
dominance is getting in the way of creating a better video service. I would
gladly pay $20 a month for a more customizable and ad-free service which
respects its users. It was my favorite website from around 2008-2011 and it's
since become a disaster.

~~~
omarchowdhury
What exactly do you want in this new video service that YouTube doesn't have
today?

~~~
xatan_dank
Besides the obvious lack of advertisements, most my the improvements would
come from resolving my main issue with YouTube, which is how aggressively the
service directs you towards content with ads. I feel that this was not the
case many years ago and that YouTube has actually gone backwards in terms of
having a reasonable interface for navigating through the vast amount of
information it hosts. I feel channels, suggested videos, subscriptions,
searching, and even monetization were more user-friendly back in the early
10's.

The problem is that, as far as I know, YouTube has not been wholly profitable
for Google at this point, so they've really been trying to squeeze all the
money they can out of it, and I feel it's come at the expense of the service
itself. I spend far less time on YouTube these days.

I would be much happier spending money directly on a service which treated its
users as customers rather than the product.

As far as other features, I think it's naive to say that YouTube has every
feature someone could want a video hosting service to have. I feel YouTube
could improve quite a bit in plenty of areas, particularly in how people
'watch' music there.

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tartuffe78
Does anyone ever expect loud layoffs?

~~~
dang
Good point. s/quietly//.

~~~
cylinder
Oh man, when I first saw this I was actually going to ping you and ask to
remove the "quietly" \- I cannot stand this new clickbait term of choice!
Thanks!

