

29-Year-Old Gets $15 Million to Decipher Song Lyrics - velodrome
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-pitch/29-old-gets-15-million-decipher-song-lyrics-124202754.html

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zacharycohn
My gut reaction reading this article was "Oh great, someone didn't learn from
the 90s."

But once they started talking about Sandberg and Andreessen annotating books,
speeches, reports, etc... that has to be where they're headed. I can see some
sort of monetization strategy there.

If the site focus eventually shifts (and I doubt this was planned from the
beginning) to "true experts explaining things," I can see a lot of potential
there. Maybe not "bigger than Google," but certainly far "bigger than a lyrics
explanation site."

~~~
lnanek2
Speeches and reports are pretty worthless, no one would move into worthless
little niches like that. Popular media like they are in now is a goldmine,
though. Pretty trivial to monetize as well. Many of my friends who do music
tied apps are at the point of swapping out the affiliates and common payment
providers for direct credit card exchange deals just to optimize percents
even.

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bravura
They are simply trying to own a particular, important part of human
consciousness: Lyrics.

The founders court popularity as their primary business function, and they
hype Rap Genius lavishly.

Monetization is completely an afterthought.

I am convinced that Rap Genius is the purest consumer play.

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thewarrior
OK so maybe some of his claims are comically grandiose.

But I've found Rap Genius useful recently for finding explanations of poems by
Yeats,Wordsworth and many others. The convenience of being able to see the
explanation right there without having to scroll or navigate away really
helped me get into the poetry. I can see this approach being extended into
many other areas.

Theres a lot of potential in the idea of being able to annotate select parts
of a document instead of having to comment on the whole document. I think we
need an annotator for the web. Maybe it would work as a browser extension and
users could annotate any part of any website with extra comments , photos etc.

Another approach might be to develop an embeddable widget which could allow
anyone to annotate any part of a web page.

But I couldnt figure how to handle changes to the original document if the
model isnt under our control.

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Helpful_Bunny
The question (and this applies to Wikipedia as well) is _whose explanation are
you reading_?

I'd throw you a quotation about the Power of Language, but I'm sure you can
imagine it already. This site marks the end of 19th / 20th Century propaganda,
which relies on an ignorant audience to swallow the lies without being able to
fact-check them[1] (e.g. The Protocols of Zion or the "re-imagining" of
Founder Father's texts to be anti-Semitic or (to be even) the notion that
America was founded as respecting all of its citizens as equal - you'll want
to read the 13th closely, you're all breaking the Law somehow, which is the
hack they're going to use on you).

Modern Propaganda doesn't do this: it uses truth, but with hooks.[2]

The More You Know.

Footnotes, because I forget that not all readers share similar thought
patterns:

[1] If this is true, what does that tell you about the content of most
mainstream American News, and its consumers, and the future of these
companies? [2] Is my statement propaganda? Answer: of course it is,
_everything_ you consume online is.

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ratsimihah
Whose? The Voice's. The ultimate truth who's always right. Wouldn't that be
convenient? I'm sure if Rap Genius is going to be bigger than Google and
Facebook (combined, obviously), they call pull that off.

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smartwater
Does RapGenius have the proper licensing to republish these lyrics? Is that
what the funding is for? Lyric websites have been shutdown many times for
this.

~~~
anon_lyrics
(disclaimer: posting anonymously because I work for a competitor)

 _Does RapGenius have the proper licensing to republish these lyrics?_

Nope. I'm always a bit surprised this never gets brought up.

 _Is that what the funding is for?_

Doubtful. If it was, they would have licensing by now - and you don't need
anywhere near that much money for it, countless smaller sites have licensing.

 _Lyric websites have been shutdown many times for this._

Yup. Most of the big "illegal" lyric sites are outside the US, but RapGenius
is not. Should be interesting.

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asdfasdfas3
I'm 'out' \- this site in my opinion is going to fail. No revenue model? Why
are people entertaining this as 'bigger thn google' are you kidding me.

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slaxman
The thing is you don't know how the site is going to playout. IMHO their
biggest advantage is having artists annotate the lyrics. It gives fans an
insight in to the song like never before.

Monetization will come in time. But first, they need to be sure what they are
creating.

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adventured
The arrogance is so intentionally outlandish it's hard to even find it
comical.

Bigger than Google, yeah ok. $300 billion market cap, $50 billion in cash, $50
billion in sales, within 15 years.

The outcome for Rap Genius is far more likely to be that of a Hunch, than a
Google. I've yet to see anything about Rap Genius that suggests their
technology or approach will yield such a breathtaking commercial windfall as
Google. Even their reach is pretty mediocre for a nearly three year old
service (speaking in terms of the huge future outcome they pander to for
headlines). See Pinterest for a comparison on size (they're 15 times larger
than Rap Genius), and those guys don't go around claiming to be the next
zillion dollar company. Zero chance Rap Genius can springboard that to Google
like results. Google was at the center of the most important Web utility of
its time: the ability to accurately and quickly find anything online; and
their technology was mind boggling good. Rap Genius is more like Wikipedia -
it's a content solution provided by the user base, and there isn't anything
earth shattering about that (see: Answers.com or Quora).

I'd say that within 24 to 36 months they'll pivot or be sold. Reality usually
hits like a hammer when you proclaim yourself the next Google (or Facebook).

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jonknee
Every rapper needs a hype man. Rap Genius is no different. Obviously Rap
Genius will not be bigger than Google.

~~~
huhtenberg
That's a very poorly executed hype.

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kriro
Feels like a pretty obvious winner...

Not as big a winner as they thing though but that posturing may just be due to
having been in fundraising mode or preemtively positioning themselves as a
juicy aquisition target..the mentioning of Instagram among Facebook, Google,
Wikipedia was rather strange.

"Annotating stuff in a way that doesn't suck" and "getting stuff annotated by
others" are two major pain points that they seem to solve rather well. The
rest is automatic as long as they can figure out legal hurdles in the domains
they want to tackle. If they can't they'll be the Napster and someone like
Amazon will probably build the iTunes.

Annotations by domain experts/creators is probably the biggest thing.
Basically allows them to extend certain products i.e. deluxe editions of books
with annotations from authors (like those director/actor comments tracks for
movies)

~~~
rckrd
Annotation is useful, but might not be able to be monetized like they hope.
Personally, I feel that RapGenius falls short when it comes to other current
enterprise collaboration methods such as Word or Google Docs.

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napoleoncomplex
The annotation aspect of Rap Genius always gets me dreaming of a site with
"completely commented code" through crowd-sourcing. Every single line/block of
code of various open source projects explained thoroughly.

When I started picking up programming, I learned by copy-pasting code bits
from everywhere, and reverse-engineering it to fit my learning projects. If,
along with that, I could have gotten thorough explanations for each block of
code I copied, I feel I'd be much more proficient in understanding the "why",
not just the "how" of programming.

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draven
There's already other versions of RapGenius for Rock/Poetry/News, so why not a
CodeGenius.

Having this kind of commenting mechanism on Github would be fantastic.

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Mexxer
So basically, Rap Genius is just a website explaining what lyrics of a song
mean with no revenue model? Not only sounds this like a not very significant
idea, the approach to music is very questionable. It doesn't matter what the
lyrics mean to the artist or some expert. The only thing that matters when
listening to music is what those lyrics mean to YOU!

Seems to me that Rap Genius is corrupting that concept.

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1234567890--
"The only thing that matters when listening to music is what those lyrics mean
to YOU!"

A lot of lyrics are full of obscure references and complex ideas not easily
understood. Perhaps especially in rap. So explanations save you hours of work
in trying to understand and appreciate the lyrics. For example:
[http://rapgenius.com/Lupe-fiasco-dumb-it-down-
lyrics](http://rapgenius.com/Lupe-fiasco-dumb-it-down-lyrics)

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marcamillion
That dude on the panel looks like a 'know-it-all-douchebag'. His posture and
everything seems very aggressive - and he was wondering why Ilan was being
defensive.

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namuol
I can't tell you how difficult it was to keep the tab open after I read the
words "bigger than Google".

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mh-
not sure whether to congratulate Rap Genius or Heroku,

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ratsimihah
Why just rap?

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lnanek2
Did you read the article? It isn't just rap.

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ratsimihah
I skimmed the article, but read the web app's title: "Rap Genius: Discover the
Meaning of Rap Lyrics"

Glad to know it isn't just rap, but then the name is very misleading.

