29-Year-Old Gets $15 Million to Decipher Song Lyrics

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-pitch/29-old-gets-15-million-decipher-song-lyrics-124202754.html

by velodrome • 13 years ago

34 31 13 years ago

finance.yahoo.com

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.

slaxman• 13 years ago

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.

marcamillion2• 13 years ago

By that same logic, you would have missed Google.

lnanek23• 13 years ago

I've never met a single investor who wanted monetization before reach. If you can't get the users, you are wasting time trying to learn how to get money out of them. Hell, you may pivot a dozen times just trying to get users and have to throw out any work you did anyway. E.g. monetize a running app just find out far more people watch what they eat than run.

bravura• 13 years ago

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.

smartwater• 13 years ago

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.

hipsters_unite• 13 years ago

I was wondering about this, sites like LyricsFreak and all the others have been on the internet since I was in primary school. I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. Plus for annotation there's better projects like hypothes.is

kiisupai• 13 years ago

Sidenote: RapGenius started out by copying the lyrics from OHHLA:

http://tumblinerb.com/post/34418855275/on-genius-and-geniuse...

anon_lyrics• 13 years ago

(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.

zacharycohn• 13 years ago

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."

lnanek23• 13 years ago

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.

marcamillion2• 13 years ago

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.

ratsimihah3• 13 years ago

Why just rap?

lnanek23• 13 years ago

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

ratsimihah3• 13 years ago

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.

ssharp• 13 years ago

They started out with rap, but have expanded their technology to many other sites, including more general lyrics and news.

Starting out in rap made a lot of sense. Rap has more lyrics than most other genres and also includes a more unique vernacular than other genres. Whereas many rock lyrics are purposefully vague and open to interpretation, rap tends to be more literal and straight-forward, but also requires some familiarity to understand its lyrics. A lot of this stuff can be easily explained with annotations.

adventured• 13 years ago

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).

larsonf• 13 years ago

I don't know though. RapGenius seems to have broken down crowd sourcing of understanding context/word meaning into very small bits. This could be absolutely huge for a machine learning input that you really cannot get with Quora or Answers.com, where the data is just not focused enough. Here it's down to the word. That's nuts and people will do the work for free. Bigger than Google? Maybe not. But bigger than pinterest, sure.

jonknee• 13 years ago

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

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

That's a very poorly executed hype.

kriro• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

mh-• 13 years ago

not sure whether to congratulate Rap Genius or Heroku,

namuol• 13 years ago

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

thewarrior• 13 years ago

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.

Helpful_Bunny• 13 years ago

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.

ratsimihah3• 13 years ago

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.

Mexxer• 13 years ago

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.

1234567890--• 13 years ago

"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

napoleoncomplex• 13 years ago

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.

draven• 13 years ago

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.

29-Year-Old Gets $15 Million to Decipher Song Lyrics

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