[HN Gopher] Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M ___________________________________________________________________ Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M Author : cytosine Score : 231 points Date : 2021-09-16 11:53 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.bloombergquint.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.bloombergquint.com) | Larrikin wrote: | It was an interesting idea but I never really found much reason | to use it over OHHLA. | chrisofspades wrote: | 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. | g8oz wrote: | 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. | wodenokoto wrote: | Given all the hubbub and attention surrounding Genius, I'm | surprised they're not actually bigger than $80 million. | somehnacct3757 wrote: | 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. | bttrsctchcld wrote: | 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. | amadeuspagel wrote: | > 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... | gootler wrote: | that's called money laundering | baybal2 wrote: | Does anybody remember a Taiwanese computer brand called Genius? I | remember they were everywhere once, and then disappeared equally | fast. | jhgb wrote: | Well...that's the company that came to my mind when I read the | headline? I didn't know there was another one. | abcd_f wrote: | 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 | emmanueloga_ wrote: | 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! | robin_reala wrote: | They made mice originally, ISTR? I had one in the late 80s, | bundled with a paint package called Dr Halo. | amelius wrote: | They also were among the first to sell handscanners. | | E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulccjXS0wPk | mkl wrote: | 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... | weeblewobble wrote: | 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. | toiletfuneral wrote: | man I totally remember that, literally the biggest douchebags I | have ever seen in my life. | | All they did was make a website with comments lmao | 1cvmask wrote: | 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? | ignoramous wrote: | 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. | bluedino wrote: | How is a song lyrics site worth any money? It was one of the | most dot-com ideas ever. | runawaybottle wrote: | 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). | reducesuffering wrote: | 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... | rchaud wrote: | 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. | stefan_ wrote: | What if annotating things is just not that worthwhile a | business? | dphnx wrote: | 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 | nathanvanfleet wrote: | That's funny because I saw that too and they came off as | charlatans to me. | [deleted] | Lammy wrote: | 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." | rrbrambley wrote: | Awwww, I forgot about this album. Gonna spend all day | relistening. | runj__ wrote: | 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. | EvRev wrote: | 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. | gfaure wrote: | 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. | acjohnson55 wrote: | 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. | Graziano_M wrote: | Check out genius on a mobile browser. It's literally unusable. | Rapgenius was great but its decline was very obvious. | athorax wrote: | Seems to work fine for me. What exactly makes it unusable? | Graziano_M wrote: | 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. | ratww wrote: | It's still broken for me half the time. And ad-blocker | does help. | johnmaguire wrote: | 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. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | $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. | baldajan wrote: | 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. | sdljfjafsd wrote: | > 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." | baldajan wrote: | I skimmed it ;) But I did looked how much they raised on | CrunchBase, seemed to be about equal of the sales price. | whimsicalism wrote: | > 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? | baldajan wrote: | 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? | whimsicalism wrote: | 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? | baldajan wrote: | 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). | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | 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. | baldajan wrote: | 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. | nemo44x wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | lbotos wrote: | 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... | adventured wrote: | 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. | vmoore wrote: | > 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/ | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > 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. | whatever1 wrote: | " 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. | asah wrote: | Google/YouTube is built on other peoples' content... | pessimizer wrote: | 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. | rchaud wrote: | People forget that in 2004 there were several streaming | video sites. They all disappeared because they featured | copyrighted content. | Mikeb85 wrote: | 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. | bliteben wrote: | Movie clips and music videos are surely a double digit | percent of youtube's views, not to mention other | categories I may be missing. | Mikeb85 wrote: | 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. | TeMPOraL wrote: | Nowadays. YouTube became big through users uploading | pirated music to it. | criley2 wrote: | Users must give youtube a permissive license to post | videos. Not so for lyrics on Genius. | whatever1 wrote: | 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. | ghaff wrote: | 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. | thrashh wrote: | 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. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > 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. | jjoonathan wrote: | 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. | MangoCoffee wrote: | 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) | [deleted] | renewiltord wrote: | 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. | shp0ngle wrote: | 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. | jazzyjackson wrote: | I was wondering how an MIT research lab had 80 megabucks to buy | a website | | https://www.media.mit.edu/ | eaenki wrote: | 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. | nemo44x wrote: | 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. | mpeg wrote: | You went to the wrong website, the right site is | https://www.medialab.la/ not http://medialab.ai/ | shp0ngle wrote: | 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! | pacoWebConsult wrote: | Sad day. Love this talk from the co-founder Tom Lehman titled | "Worse is Better" [1] | | [1]: https://youtu.be/X45YY97FmL4 | busterarm wrote: | Tom is an incredibly smart guy. I'm excited to see what his | next venture might be. | busterarm wrote: | 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. | donohoe wrote: | 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. | uyt wrote: | 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. | humanistbot wrote: | 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. | monkeybutton wrote: | 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. | donohoe wrote: | 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. | gkoberger wrote: | 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... | stingrae wrote: | This video from techcrunch disrupt kind of showed why the | original leadership may have had issues: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo | NelsonMinar wrote: | 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... | bifrost wrote: | 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. | 41209 wrote: | 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. | aitchnyu wrote: | The entry for If by Rudyard Kipling warms my heart | https://genius.com/1247142 | 41209 wrote: | 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 | jrumbut wrote: | 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. | asdff wrote: | 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. | thinkingemote wrote: | 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. | pseudolus wrote: | The founders did a pretty funny (and cringeworthy) interview with | TechCrunch in their early years: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo | 1billionstories wrote: | they got trolled well by Sacha Baron Cohen on This is America | too | nailer wrote: | 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. | JackFr wrote: | 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. | Tossrock wrote: | 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 | [deleted] | eaenki wrote: | 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. | OJFord wrote: | > 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. | setgree wrote: | 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/ | TuringNYC wrote: | 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? | notatoad wrote: | 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? | jsudi wrote: | Do the bands have the rights to the lyrics? | CydeWeys wrote: | It's either them or their record company, or maybe a | songwriter. | squeaky-clean wrote: | 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. | CydeWeys wrote: | 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. | iamben wrote: | 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. | pessimizer wrote: | 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. | wpietri wrote: | 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. | iamben wrote: | 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. | wpietri wrote: | 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. | iamben wrote: | 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. | chrisseaton wrote: | What's in it for them? Why would they care about people | mangling their lyrics? | TuringNYC wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | pessimizer wrote: | I was in touring bands for years, and I didn't care if | anyone ever read my lyrics, or if they misunderstood | them. | res0nat0r wrote: | There are artists who supply official annotations and | additional insight into their lyrics. Example: | https://genius.com/4196571? | mhh__ wrote: | 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. | trynewideas wrote: | 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. | wpietri wrote: | > 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. | CPLX wrote: | I still have my "Quora Top Writer 2013" fleece jacket | though. | | So there's that. | setgree wrote: | 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 | ghostbrainalpha wrote: | 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. | TuringNYC wrote: | > anybody know what caused so much trouble? | | Removing the co-founder, who had so much passion for the | business? | peterthehacker wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | OJFord wrote: | 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. | mbesto wrote: | 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. | mmmpop wrote: | 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. | throwdecro wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | SquishyPanda23 wrote: | 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. | hobofan wrote: | 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. | relaxatorium wrote: | 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. | lotsofpulp wrote: | > That sounds great to me, anybody know what caused so much | trouble? | | They are competing with Wikipedia? | OJFord wrote: | 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_publicat | ions... | | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28551572 | bambax wrote: | 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. | DeBraid wrote: | 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... | jayzalowitz wrote: | If you are capable of making this post, you are capable of | self hosting rails on something closer to the metal. | WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: | 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. | bambax wrote: | 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 | tinyhouse wrote: | 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. | wallawe wrote: | 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. | akudha wrote: | 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 | airstrike wrote: | Well, there's still https://songmeanings.com/ but sadly the | verse-by-verse annotation feature isn't there. | [deleted] | david_allison wrote: | > 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. | dragonwriter wrote: | > The product is significantly better than other lyric sites | | And...how much are people willing to pay for (annotated or not) | song lyrics? | jollybean wrote: | 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. | acdha wrote: | > 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. | jollybean wrote: | It was a party/hustle from the beginning. These guys have a | VICE-like ethos. | acdha wrote: | 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". | jollybean wrote: | 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. | byoung2 wrote: | 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. | colmvp wrote: | I recall Genius was hot, hot, hot way back when. Crazy that it | was sold for less than 100M. | rchaud wrote: | 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. | asdff wrote: | I remember the days when the most obtrusive ad you'd see | browsing the web was a paypal donation button | hedberg10 wrote: | 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. | Rastonbury wrote: | 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. | cytzol wrote: | 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. | CraftThatBlock wrote: | I think this is a bug on Firefox, as my Firefox does the same | behavior but works fine on Chrome based browsers. | oauea wrote: | More like poorly implemented user agent sniffing done by | "Genius" | nightpool wrote: | 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. | pteraspidomorph wrote: | Good to know you're moving towards putting the | annotations back on the side, but please deploy that for | Firefox users too. | [deleted] | capableweb wrote: | 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 | wingerlang wrote: | 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. | JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: | 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. | dzonga wrote: | 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. | lotsofpulp wrote: | > 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. | yarcob wrote: | Spotify doesn't, and even for Apple Music lyrics are a | somewhat recent addition afaik. | scrollaway wrote: | Spotify does, though not for all. And... those lyrics come | from Genius, so yeah. | | Source: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/lyrics/ | yarcob wrote: | 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? | Gene_Parmesan wrote: | 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. | tallies wrote: | 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 | redisman wrote: | > 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. | duxup wrote: | >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. | IggleSniggle wrote: | 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. | pessimizer wrote: | Facebook was just a reinvention of MySpace with was a | reinvention of Friendster. | micromacrofoot wrote: | 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. | duxup wrote: | >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? | santiagobasulto wrote: | If you google ANY SONG, Genius will be a top 3 result. Their | SEO is very good. | jerrre wrote: | A little too good even [1], they were deranked for some | time... | | [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/6x7kzr/heres-why-rap- | genius-... | duxup wrote: | Yeah it's very possible I've used their site ... just not | noticed. | antidaily wrote: | Douchebags gonna douchebag. | s3r3nity wrote: | Note that this is _not_ the MIT Media Lab, which _could_ have | been an interesting scenario (IMO), but rather a media holding | company. | cadr wrote: | My brain definitely boggled when I read the headline. | neilv wrote: | 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.) | 3pt14159 wrote: | 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. | ThrowAwayCause wrote: | 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 f _ckers, | 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!_ | [deleted] | skizm wrote: | 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. | milkthefat wrote: | I believe they did an encoding(Morse code or something) in the | lyrics to prove google was using them verbatim. | ocdtrekkie wrote: | 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. | bobmaxup wrote: | Didn't they get accused of doing the same thing? | | https://www.vice.com/en/article/6wnp4r/an-annotated- | intervie... | klllllllz wrote: | 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/ | ch33zer wrote: | 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? | nemo44x wrote: | More than $80m in profit from throwing ads on the rot. | wombat-man wrote: | 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. | PhilipA wrote: | 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. | peterthehacker wrote: | 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. | antoinec wrote: | 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...) | dec0dedab0de wrote: | But would they have been able to pay the licensing for all | those lyrics if they didn't have investors? | brianwawok wrote: | 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 | acdha wrote: | 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. | brianwawok wrote: | 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... | john_yaya wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | dannyw wrote: | That's contextual. For example, as someone living outside the | USA with no immigration pathways, I simply can't get a FAANG | salary. | brianwawok wrote: | 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. | thebean11 wrote: | Sure, but they also will have a much more difficult time | getting the type of VC money American startups get. | Avalaxy wrote: | A bootstrapper doesn't need that. | trynewideas wrote: | 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-... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-16 23:00 UTC)