It's also a go to for me. But lately I've been noticing that annotations stagnate. Songs that may be 2-3 years old only would have like a single phrase annotated (and pretty poorly).
@@DARKredDOLLAR There are annotations that I want to make but don't have enough IQ. And it's tough to get a lot of IQ when there's so much less activity.
It's crazy to me that the whole video content saga of Genius was entirely unknown to me. I've only ever known about it as a lyric annotation site. I really wish that I had known about the attempt to do annotations of news and literature. I would have really dug that.
The literature part was cool but news not so much. Since the whole thing was user edited, kinda like Wikipedia, it left way too much room for opinion on subjects that should be discussed on a factual basis.
I think the main lesson here is to listen to customer feedback and not spend resources on random crap. I was a RapGenius user back in like 2014 and I'm still not over the fact that it died. The idea was important for the Hip-Hop culture.
I remember the time where Genius displayed lyrics and facts/translations for lyrics INSIDE SPOTIFY, just like it is now but it was like 10 slides per song, one slide was the lyrics, next one was explaining those and on and on back and forth
Them suing Google for scraping their site to display lyrics is INCREDIBLY IRONIC because I know for a FACT that RG was, at some point, automatically scraping other lyric sites for lyrics that users weren't annotating.
@@Thegbearthe effort of uploading lyrics of many songs online. Idk the law about this but it seems fair to be mad at someone taking for free stuff you used a lot of time to create
@@partsaklo Yeah but no matter how much effort you put in, you’re still ultimately putting other people’s copyrighted work on your site. You can’t sue Google for that because you don’t own any of it. Be mad if you want to, I guess, but it was your choice to create your business around transcribing other people’s intellectual property. Now, what they DO own are the explanations of the lyrics, the commentary on it is definitely theirs. But that’s not what Google scraped from the site.
genius always does a breakdown for songs that don’t need a breakdown. they should’ve brought on more guests with rap lyrics that could use a real breakdown
Incredible video so well researched. Another thing, there was a thriving community on the forums but around 18-19 they locked all uses out of the forum to 'clean it up', where they basically deleted half of all threads and band some of the most active users. They said it was to get conversations more on topic but it ultimately destroyed any character / culture the community had and most of us had no more reason to keep checking in
yeah i miss the forums. honestly, it was more civilized than other hip hop forums and they had a good balance between jokes/memes and serious rap discussions.
As someone who used to edit back in the very early days, the turning point for me was when they changed the rules on what annotations should be. In theory, the change made sense - the message to editors was that not every line needed annotating, and annotations should be more concise. In reality, the people engaging with the site wanted to dig deeper than was deemed “necessary”, and people reading annotations wanted more than a surface-level translation of what one particular slang term meant. If you look at 2012-era annotations, you’ll see links to interviews with the artist where they’ve discussed similar topics to what they’re referring to in the song, fan theories, similar lyrics from other rappers etc etc. Nowadays, there are frequently only a handful of annotations per song, and they rarely amount to more than “this is a slang term for cocaine” or “this lyric refers to an incident involving this particular celebrity”. Maboo was obviously a loose cannon and by no means should he have been allowed to stay after the “incel incident”, but it became clear after he left that the other co-founders didn’t have a grasp over why so many passionate hip-hop fans had an interest in contributing to this project in the first place. Hanging with friends and discussing which rappers have the dopest lyrics, and backing up your take by reciting bars and explaining the meaning behind them, is an experience most long-time rap fans can probably relate to - genius was the internet’s version of this, and reducing it down to surface-level information is neither providing a service the wider public need, nor is it catering to the needs of your passionate community. It’s also worth noting that in the early pre-forum days, there was a Facebook group for all the editors/mods etc which was vibrant and allowed people to connect in a way that anonymised forums didn’t. Connecting with people who you could see were more than just a username on a forum page was cool, and there were a bunch of really cool opportunities that got offered up during that time - I remember the whole group were given the opportunity to get guest list for their secret SXSW takeover with Childish Gambino, and they’d set up private Q&A sessions with artists who were coming to the office to do Genius Verified stuff when that was just starting to get off the ground. They had something really amazing going on and it’s such a shame they let it die off.
I'm just picturing someone going line by line through a Pusha T song.. "cocaine reference, cochise reference, cocaine reference" Instead of what I KNOW those genius pages used to look like.
I agree, especially with the first paragraph. I remember 2013 onward none of my annotations would get approved. And the ones from other users that would be approved all lacked depth or were just outright wrong. I stopped using the site shortly after because I could tell the people running the site were not real Rap fans. I'm not sad to see their demise.
this is CRAZY, cause in middle school (in like 2012 or 2013) I had to do a presentation on a company of my choice (for career day) and I chose RapGenius, cause I thought it had so much potential at the time, and I was fascinated by it.
Genuinely cannot comprehend what drives CEO's to just burn money like that, nobody thought that anything they were doing was a good idea both in and outside the company lmao
It's what CEOs do when you hire them to run a company they have no personal stake in. They make the line go up, collect a million dollar bonus and when the company goes tits up they collect a "parachute" on top. Literally the ideal way to do their "job". And it's not going to stop unless they're made liable for the failure of the companies they run
The problem is venture capital: If someone gives you 50 million dollars, they expect a chance to make half a billion back. A community of people annotating rap lyrics won't achieve that return. That means you have to take big risks to try and dominate the world in some way. Hence all the stupid, overambitious product ideas, rather than focusing on and improving what works.
this videos style is vaguely reminiscent of disrupt, and i am living for it. the editing is wonderful. your language is engaging. it has the investigative journalism feel while still being evident of a personal style. very good video, man. crazy it has so few views compared to what i’d expect. this should be a 700k views video at LEAST
I was/still am a editor at Genius. Started as a hobby in 2013 and when it became more dedicated, the german moderators began contacting me if I wouldn't be interested to officially join them. We still have a semi-active group chat where this video was posted. Great video, honestly! One of my favourite fuck up stories about Genius is that they tried to expand globally, but especially in Europe.We had a site manager who got paid 450€/month to keep him "warm" and he got a couple of bonuses to keep him a operation in Germany afloat. With that whole icon change thing: Guess what they dropped as well? Any expansion efforts they've tried for the last three years. Our site manager was just dropped and reduced of being a moderator.
I’ll never forget BET did this back room cypher thing on 106 and Park where they brought rappers to freestyle for like 3 minutes and they partnered with Rap Genius to showcase the annotations proving the lyrics and meaning while the rapper was rapping. A lesser known Vic Mensa had one of the best freestyles and reading the explanations form Genius made me dive into the website and did that for more songs.
Damn crazy how we get this kind of quality storytelling on TH-cam. I'm literally a verified artist who's been annotating his own lyrics for years on Genius and didn't know any of this. Thank you
WOW -really? Since I'm an investor/trader as well as music fanatic, I always try to stay-on-top of both finance & music industries - Rap Genius had so much potential, it's a damn shame - aside from the Google dilemma, they did what most inexperienced & unsuccessful startups (which is a cardinal sin); they tried to expand too quickly into different avenues & others genres (i.e. WeWork, Snap, Jawbone, Crumbs, etc.) without focusing on their underlying "core" business #UNREAL #RapGenius documentary by @TyFrom99 #TH-cam
What we don't talk about is the fact that the staffs of international communities have been so neglected, whereas for example, Genius France generates a lot of traffic on the site, and artists such as Freeze Corleone get a lot of annotations when there's a release of even one featuring verse on another rapper’s song.
Who would have thought - three corny Yale grads a la Kendall Roy from HBO's "Succession" killed yet another community-generated and maintained forum. These businessmen know so little about how driving and preserving culture can be a real moneymaker in a time where everything feels fleeting. Really cool work on this, man, subbed and have your Creator Courses video on the queue!
I was a mod on the site for a couple years. ~50k iq last i checked. Me and a bunch of the other moderators mostly left the site together and started a big group chat around 2019. We're all still active in the group chat and we all keep in touch. A couple of the guys still use the site but not like they used to and most of us don't use it at all anymore. Was a cool hobby for a while but the staff had no clue what they were doing and it became more frustrating than rewarding fast. Made some lifelong friends from that site and it sucked to see the downfall of it but god they did it to themselves.
i signed up for this site back in 2013 just to annotate some lyrics for my favorite Bones songs, i had no idea about more than half of this stuff. i never used to the forum. i only signed up mostly just cuz i liked the idea that you could explain lyric meanings to people who otherwise wouldn't understand them. crazy how there was so much going on behind the scenes for such a simple concept
Bro I watched the whole video, went to click your profile to check out more vids and was blown away to see your subs. From the quality I was expecting like 100k+. Hopefully you get there soon, the talent and quality are already there.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool hip-hop head from NYC. In a fit of frustration with inaccurate transcriptions on Genius one day, years ago, I sat and wrote a complete, accurate transcription of a song in my rotation. I waited weeks or months, checked again, and saw that my annotation had never actually been checked or approved. I tried to find out how to make that happen. Apparently, I had to participate in the community for a certain amount of time in order to level up my account to the point where I could just add a transcription without having to get someone else to approve it. Til this day, 5+ years later, the version of that song's lyrics is the highly inaccurate one full of nonsense and missed words, while my actually perfect transcription sits on their servers, un-approved. That is why genius failed. Their model is to use users to build out their product, but they don't actually make that process accessible.
I think that is your opportunity to start something that YOU KNOW ABOUT its sad that white people start companies on black art they know nothing about and bag billions while most of the contributes are black. Start small who knows
I'm an old school Genius editor (going wayyy back) and still write in-depth annotations sometimes, for the same reason - I care about the music, and hate to see those kinds of errors. I still have my account privileges - drop the name and artist, I'd be happy to verify your transcription.
As a musician, I’d prefer Genius to be semi-bound to the labels the artists are working under and that every artist page allows for unique designs so that the experience of reading the lyrics folder the analog way can be successfully transposed.
Def a great idea. This was always a highlight of buying a CD. Some of the most memorable things were looking through the artwork and seeing how it interacted with the words, and also seeing what font the artist went with. I always felt lucky if there were some written lore stories. The most memorable booklets I recall were Slipknot and Gorillaz (their self-titled debuts to be specific).
I happened across this video just now, curious about a website I’d passively enjoyed for a little while but never dove into. From end to end, I found the story eye-opening, and your brilliant production quality really held my attention. Also - perhaps most of all - I appreciate that you’re interested in tackling new perspectives with this work and committed to addressing your own inaccuracies. Keep up the fantastic efforts, and I wish you much success with this channel!
Can believe they got rid of deconstructed, that was the only outlet for us young producers to pick the brains of our favorite producers or producers that produced hit songs.
You mentioned very early on in the video that they were inspired by the movie "The Social Network". And to me, this already tells me everything I need to know. I hear this, and, yeah! Of course it's going to fall apart! Movies like these are supposed to be a warning, not a damn lesson! This is why somebody telling me that their favorite movie is "The Wolf of Wallstreet" is one hell of a glowing red flag to me...
"Don't model your business attitudes after people who got in massive amounts of legal trouble" doesn't sound like that contentious of a statement, but we live in a very silly world.
I was going to say that! Movies like WOWS, Fight Club, and American Psycho are great movies but a lot of people that love them didnt understood their message at all. Media literacy I guess.
This video was amazing! You are honestly one of the best upcoming content creators, its very well made. Excited to see you build your video catalogue 😁
Wow I had no idea about any of this. I always just thought of Genius as a lyrics company, one that always had the best and most reliable lyrics for a song, often with annotations. I had no idea that the forums were such a core part, or that they tried 100 different side projects based just on the not-that-exciting concept of annotations. This whole video is just proof that any idiots can have a good idea, any rich and savvy idiots can turn that idea into a company, but those same idiots will inevitably drive the company into the dirt.
Damn this was good!! Great storytelling with facts to back it up. The editing was superb. And I learned a lot about Genius and what NOT to do as a company. Glad my cousin sent this to me
I’m 27 and you made me feel so old every time you said most viewers only know genius for the verified videos 😭😭 my earliest memory is around 2011-12 when it was still rap genius and all I did was look up Tyler the creator and Earl sweatshirt OF lyrics 😅
I found your channel on reddit and im surprised with the quality. Youve given me motivation to improve my editing game too and I hope you grow big in the future !
actually incredible video. great storytelling on a niche but interesting topic, good speaking voice, good editing. i was shocked to see you only have 3,000 subscribers. awesome stuff!
Crazy to see how things wound up. Me and the homies would be up breaking down Lupe lyrics on Rap Genius like we got paid for it. Was the dopest shit ever.
They had a product that could reliably incite emotions in me almost every time. The euphoria of reading annotations, seeing if you got it right. Watching Deconstructed and really leaning into the producer’s vibe. Sad to see they fumbled that.
Seems to be an issue a lot of Internet companies fall into. Constant growth. Not just happy to create a good service for a specific interest, everything needs to be a media empire now.
Idk why this was recommended to me, but this is an amazing video. I had absolutely no idea all of this was going on, i thought the site was just to look up lyrics
i hate what happened to genius, because genius is still the best source of lyrics. musixmatch can't even get the lyrics to "rapp snitch knishes" correct ("rap snitch kisses"), it only gets worse the more obscure the song
At least they still have a large volume and cataloge of lyrics. But unfortunately their annotation which made them unique from other lyric websites is outdated or incomplete. Most MF DOOM and other old school song lyrics suffer suffer that fate
Just started the video but it’s crazy. I was a very active member of the Genius forums, it was a truly special place where hip hop could be discussed in passionate depth.
imo the worst part of their downfall was how horrible the recent site redesign was. seems like everyone who used the site universally hated it because the old design was pretty much perfect for what it was but the new one is unintuitive and makes you scroll way too much. all to create more space for ads of course. i used to love writing annotations but i haven’t used it much since they fully switched to the new design
They tried to sell my company an analytics solution where you could see how many times your brand was mentioned in a rap song as a show of relevance. I was like, I don’t think we need that data point but it sounds cool though!
man, I wasnt part of the forum in 2011-2013, but I can remember it so vividly in back in 2014 when rap genius had rnb genius, pop genius and all the other genres on their website and the yellow diamond logo, but for other genres it would be different colors and maan I thought it looked so cool and the concept that every genre had its own site was one of the coolest things to me as a child, i would be on their site for hours and hours just clicking through stuff. Then, genius verified videos came out at some point when i was a teenager and i was like ,,oh, people don't know genius like that, they don't know how legendary this site actually is'' And then all of a sudden this series became such a hit which was so weird to see for someone who mainly knew them for their website. I'm so so glad you made this video cause it put everything into perspective for me. literally just last week i was thinking: man, will people ever know that genius was rap genius, and rnb genius and other kinds of genius as well? I want to see this old site one more time just to reminisce lol I was so surprised watching this video and seeing that around the time I enjoyed rap genius the most (2013/2014) it was already starting to fall apart which i never wouldve guessed cause i was never on their forum as a early member, man. It's really sad to see, this site meant so much to me man, it was the only way for me to look at lyrics and start understanding them for what they were, it really shaped my listening experience and it quickly became my favorite thing on the internet as an absolute music lover Nowadays, when i want to search for lyrics i still look at genius, but it just doesn't feel special at all. The app on the phone is terrible (filled with ads and lags), the website itself doesn't seem to have any interesting articles anymore, even the annotations which was really what made genius iconic for me, have become less and less. I remember being blown away when I would look up a kendrick song back in 2015 and the whole site was colored yellow it was like the craziest thing to see lol
That’s absolutely fucking wild that some people didn’t know about rap genius website lol. Guess it’s a sign that I’m getting old. This video was really informative because I still go on rapgenius for artists I like and wondered why albums are getting little views/annotations over the years. I guess I found out why 🤷♂️
I always thought it was corny how they ran the site like wikipedia and basically used some arbitrary "IQ" system to motivate people into building the entire lyrics catalog for no money at all
Most free social media have this business model, get users on your site and reward them with internet points whilst blasting ads in between. Everything from instagram Reddit fandom etc
Some people like online points even if it doesn't mean much, I see nothing wrong with that. Besides, the IQ is about the editor's knowledge when it comes to annotating lyrics. If you're responsible for explaining or elaborating a lot of it, then obviously you're a "genius" when it comes to lyrics.
i can’t remember the name of the channel but your editing style with the text to speech reminds me a lot of them. i enjoyed that style and haven’t seen it in a long time, im glad to see you’re doing your own thing with it !
I used to absolutely love this site for checking up on lyrics. Nowadays I go on to check an absolute mega hit with millions upon millions of streams and am surprised to see less than 10% of the song has even been annotated. Try to annotate it and the song is "locked". what a shame
Prior to this video, my impression of Rap Genius or now Genius, was just some humble website with a neat Annotation mechanism. I am stunned that it was much bigger than what I initially thought.
ive never seen this channel before and when i was watching this video i just had assumed this was one of those video essay channels with a couple million subs, how the hell does this channel only have 2k?
One kinda major thing you missed is that the Rap Genius forums is where the term "GOAT" was popularized. Ten years ago you'd see it everywhere on their forums and then only a couple years after would you see it being used everywhere in mainstream culture.
nah nah it was def GOAT, greatest of all time, I know it from COD especially MW2 (2009) or Black Ops 1 through Whiteboy7thst on YT. I think it was used in World of Warcraft lexicon too, because it came up in a 2008 documentary called Second Skin about gaming addiction. Which is free on YT too. Stuff I shouldn't remember so well anyway lol
watched this in its entirety and then lost my shit at how you have under 2,000 subscribers or how this video isnt ridiculously more popular. this is genuinely amazing content bro keep it up also this video is 5 months old too which is crazy
I remember their terrible appearance on the Combat Jack show. Bad decision to make themselves the public face of the company. They weren't built for that.
I've been in Genius since 2019, way after its heyday, and it's only gotten worse. I remember when Genius got bought by MediaLab. The community was NOT happy. Nowadays, Genius is so ostensibly for-profit, they even advertise their prices for having a front page article. And also, the new song pages redesign looks ugly.
It was sorta weird that one day when I scrolled down on Spotify there wasn’t anymore facts and quotes from artists anymore. But eventually I stopped noticing it
As an English teacher I used this website a lot in the past and also promoted it to my students. It also had some poetry which was a nice add. I guess I'll have to find something different.
The quality of this video is amazing! Great delivery. Surprised at your sub count, I know it’s only a matter of time til it blows up, your delivery is certainly one that is easy to follow and keeps the listener/viewer engaged.
I was an editor and then a moderator for a while on Genius and was active for like 8 years on there, was a really fun time, but it evolved into something that felt soul- and passionless. I worked on the Elliot Rodgers Manifesto as well and even though it was known that Maboo was kinda an asshole with a drug problem, that was beyond fucked up. The platform was beyond ugly, the community became a cesspool of ads, bots & trolling and there was almost no communication with any of the mods either, the international communities were completely abandoned. Every new feature they launched was expected by many to be failures and mostly they were. The focus on video content became apparent early on. Sad to see such a great idea turn into such a great mess
I am an Editor of Genius, once a regular contributor like many here. If you happened to be a Public Enemy fan and saw some annotations, chances are I either wrote it, edited it, or made suggestions. I wasn't as "keen," or aware, of the activities of the top honchos (such as the Maboo manifesto incident, or the fire sale, Genius Live), other than like many, we were vying to become editors and moderators so we could handle the lyrics and annotations better. Due to personal reasons, I became inactive a few years ago, but I am slowly becoming active again. I've diversified my genres aside from hip-hop, but as I've discovered transcribing liturgical music, the formatting rules cannot absolutely be uniform. There are some that I agree with, such as making one-bar annotations scarce as possible, but there are times the rules and style guide is... misguided at best. You can't even put Hangul (the Korean alphabet) on a song title! Want to put an all-lowercase title from an artist's song? Too bad, you have to do this and that. One of the many things I resent is the fact that they changed the site for no reason, but as you all can see, it was just surface level. The forums are still shit, the international community has mostly been left aside (in fact, I am the only editor that's visibly listed for my country), and them focusing on articles and videos (that aren't hosted there, but here on TH-cam as an additional revenue flow) is just like putting make up on a pig rolling in a dirty sty. When they did that, it was game over. One of the most controversial things to happen in the userbase was the removal of mod role of a prominent user, and well-loved by all communities for his constant coaching and elevation to Editor for several contributors. Many left with him. I stayed out of love for music. Oh, and the IQ system? Garbage. I use my personal annotations like newspaper tearsheets to add up my writing portfolio, but that's about it.
As a beat maker, “Deconstructed” was one of my fav series on TH-cam. Now I know why it disappeared. 😢
Yo same!! At least we got some clarity now lol
Wait they stopped doing deconstructed videos?! But why? They still do behind the lyric videos
@@dinkleberg794did u watch the video lol
Yooo same here!! My fav was kendricks love
making beats is like taking shits.
I still use Genius for lyrics/meanings. The site feels self-sustaining at this point. Let's just hope it stays up.
It’s still easily the go-to lyric site, undoubtedly
lol you simpleton
And you can Wikipedia style edit the lyrics. The community will keep it alive
It's also a go to for me. But lately I've been noticing that annotations stagnate. Songs that may be 2-3 years old only would have like a single phrase annotated (and pretty poorly).
@@DARKredDOLLAR There are annotations that I want to make but don't have enough IQ. And it's tough to get a lot of IQ when there's so much less activity.
It's crazy to me that the whole video content saga of Genius was entirely unknown to me. I've only ever known about it as a lyric annotation site. I really wish that I had known about the attempt to do annotations of news and literature. I would have really dug that.
The literature part was cool but news not so much. Since the whole thing was user edited, kinda like Wikipedia, it left way too much room for opinion on subjects that should be discussed on a factual basis.
i used a genius literature article for an english class last year and it worked
@@bomboclaaat92😊
Back in High School I used Poetry Genius for essays. Pretty barren though overall but it did help a bit
You could say poor advertising
its crazy cause genius really couldve been so huge and had so much potential to be more than it became
I think the main lesson here is to listen to customer feedback and not spend resources on random crap. I was a RapGenius user back in like 2014 and I'm still not over the fact that it died. The idea was important for the Hip-Hop culture.
Agree.
Couldn't possibly agree more. Same, user since 2014 and sadly watched it die over the course of a decade.
You’re literally white though? Act your race… nigga culture isn’t yours
Youd wanna start getting over it quick or do something about it, thats a long time my man.
@@damotheman4196 let us mourn in our own time 😂
I remember the time where Genius displayed lyrics and facts/translations for lyrics INSIDE SPOTIFY, just like it is now but it was like 10 slides per song, one slide was the lyrics, next one was explaining those and on and on back and forth
such a good feature, got downgraded so hard
I miss that feature :(
Damnnn I completely forgot about that
@@wakeupsaudiiiilowkey the full lyrics is better to have
Forgot about that completely
Them suing Google for scraping their site to display lyrics is INCREDIBLY IRONIC because I know for a FACT that RG was, at some point, automatically scraping other lyric sites for lyrics that users weren't annotating.
I remember some lyrics having the “Lyrics by MusicMatch” in them on some of the more obscure songs that didn’t get annotations lol, it was crazy
They also don’t own the lyrics, what are they trying to claim is theirs? The literal concept of putting lyrics on a screen?
he completely ripped off the "original hip hop lyrics archive" aka ohhla. it was disgraceful.
@@Thegbearthe effort of uploading lyrics of many songs online. Idk the law about this but it seems fair to be mad at someone taking for free stuff you used a lot of time to create
@@partsaklo Yeah but no matter how much effort you put in, you’re still ultimately putting other people’s copyrighted work on your site. You can’t sue Google for that because you don’t own any of it. Be mad if you want to, I guess, but it was your choice to create your business around transcribing other people’s intellectual property. Now, what they DO own are the explanations of the lyrics, the commentary on it is definitely theirs. But that’s not what Google scraped from the site.
Their deconstructed series is super underrated. It’s like a time capsule for soundcloud rap
genius always does a breakdown for songs that don’t need a breakdown. they should’ve brought on more guests with rap lyrics that could use a real breakdown
Incredible video so well researched. Another thing, there was a thriving community on the forums but around 18-19 they locked all uses out of the forum to 'clean it up', where they basically deleted half of all threads and band some of the most active users. They said it was to get conversations more on topic but it ultimately destroyed any character / culture the community had and most of us had no more reason to keep checking in
yeah i miss the forums. honestly, it was more civilized than other hip hop forums and they had a good balance between jokes/memes and serious rap discussions.
Rip YDB, Buff, KanyeSucks, Unfukwitable, Blackpanther, Mr Greatness, Donger, Gucci Flipflops, YXNGXAN etc
unfuckwitable was one of the goats
As someone who used to edit back in the very early days, the turning point for me was when they changed the rules on what annotations should be. In theory, the change made sense - the message to editors was that not every line needed annotating, and annotations should be more concise. In reality, the people engaging with the site wanted to dig deeper than was deemed “necessary”, and people reading annotations wanted more than a surface-level translation of what one particular slang term meant. If you look at 2012-era annotations, you’ll see links to interviews with the artist where they’ve discussed similar topics to what they’re referring to in the song, fan theories, similar lyrics from other rappers etc etc. Nowadays, there are frequently only a handful of annotations per song, and they rarely amount to more than “this is a slang term for cocaine” or “this lyric refers to an incident involving this particular celebrity”.
Maboo was obviously a loose cannon and by no means should he have been allowed to stay after the “incel incident”, but it became clear after he left that the other co-founders didn’t have a grasp over why so many passionate hip-hop fans had an interest in contributing to this project in the first place. Hanging with friends and discussing which rappers have the dopest lyrics, and backing up your take by reciting bars and explaining the meaning behind them, is an experience most long-time rap fans can probably relate to - genius was the internet’s version of this, and reducing it down to surface-level information is neither providing a service the wider public need, nor is it catering to the needs of your passionate community.
It’s also worth noting that in the early pre-forum days, there was a Facebook group for all the editors/mods etc which was vibrant and allowed people to connect in a way that anonymised forums didn’t. Connecting with people who you could see were more than just a username on a forum page was cool, and there were a bunch of really cool opportunities that got offered up during that time - I remember the whole group were given the opportunity to get guest list for their secret SXSW takeover with Childish Gambino, and they’d set up private Q&A sessions with artists who were coming to the office to do Genius Verified stuff when that was just starting to get off the ground. They had something really amazing going on and it’s such a shame they let it die off.
Damn. Much respect to you for being one of the OGs
Well explained!
Sheeeesh what an essay! Haha but very explained!
I'm just picturing someone going line by line through a Pusha T song.. "cocaine reference, cochise reference, cocaine reference"
Instead of what I KNOW those genius pages used to look like.
I agree, especially with the first paragraph. I remember 2013 onward none of my annotations would get approved. And the ones from other users that would be approved all lacked depth or were just outright wrong. I stopped using the site shortly after because I could tell the people running the site were not real Rap fans. I'm not sad to see their demise.
this is CRAZY, cause in middle school (in like 2012 or 2013) I had to do a presentation on a company of my choice (for career day) and I chose RapGenius, cause I thought it had so much potential at the time, and I was fascinated by it.
Spotify and Apple music added lyrics to there own apps. Not that hard.
@@Lucas_Antar they weren't popular and well-developed back in 2012/2013 lol
@Lucas_Antar having lyrics & explaining the lyrics are very much different bro..... Spotify could never. Lol
@@SupremeOracle Spotify messes up lyrics 😂
Lol your teachers know you turned out just like Genius did
Genuinely cannot comprehend what drives CEO's to just burn money like that, nobody thought that anything they were doing was a good idea both in and outside the company lmao
It's what CEOs do when you hire them to run a company they have no personal stake in. They make the line go up, collect a million dollar bonus and when the company goes tits up they collect a "parachute" on top. Literally the ideal way to do their "job". And it's not going to stop unless they're made liable for the failure of the companies they run
The problem is venture capital: If someone gives you 50 million dollars, they expect a chance to make half a billion back. A community of people annotating rap lyrics won't achieve that return. That means you have to take big risks to try and dominate the world in some way. Hence all the stupid, overambitious product ideas, rather than focusing on and improving what works.
@@CErra310 nothing to do with a genius but OK.
@@asonofliberty3662 that's true, nobody who is involved in this mess could be considered "a genius"
@@CErra310 VTT
this videos style is vaguely reminiscent of disrupt, and i am living for it. the editing is wonderful. your language is engaging. it has the investigative journalism feel while still being evident of a personal style. very good video, man. crazy it has so few views compared to what i’d expect. this should be a 700k views video at LEAST
Algorithm promoting this like rn was the bud on my feed and many other I'm sure
Well said
U right
I was/still am a editor at Genius. Started as a hobby in 2013 and when it became more dedicated, the german moderators began contacting me if I wouldn't be interested to officially join them. We still have a semi-active group chat where this video was posted. Great video, honestly!
One of my favourite fuck up stories about Genius is that they tried to expand globally, but especially in Europe.We had a site manager who got paid 450€/month to keep him "warm" and he got a couple of bonuses to keep him a operation in Germany afloat. With that whole icon change thing: Guess what they dropped as well?
Any expansion efforts they've tried for the last three years. Our site manager was just dropped and reduced of being a moderator.
cosign
I’ll never forget BET did this back room cypher thing on 106 and Park where they brought rappers to freestyle for like 3 minutes and they partnered with Rap Genius to showcase the annotations proving the lyrics and meaning while the rapper was rapping.
A lesser known Vic Mensa had one of the best freestyles and reading the explanations form Genius made me dive into the website and did that for more songs.
Damn crazy how we get this kind of quality storytelling on TH-cam. I'm literally a verified artist who's been annotating his own lyrics for years on Genius and didn't know any of this. Thank you
WOW -really? Since I'm an investor/trader as well as music fanatic, I always try to stay-on-top of both finance & music industries - Rap Genius had so much potential, it's a damn shame - aside from the Google dilemma, they did what most inexperienced & unsuccessful startups (which is a cardinal sin); they tried to expand too quickly into different avenues & others genres (i.e. WeWork, Snap, Jawbone, Crumbs, etc.) without focusing on their underlying "core" business #UNREAL #RapGenius documentary by @TyFrom99 #TH-cam
What we don't talk about is the fact that the staffs of international communities have been so neglected, whereas for example, Genius France generates a lot of traffic on the site, and artists such as Freeze Corleone get a lot of annotations when there's a release of even one featuring verse on another rapper’s song.
This video was so well made. I was a user back in 2015 and left my account in 2018. I had no idea of the history and current fallings of Rap Genius.
Who would have thought - three corny Yale grads a la Kendall Roy from HBO's "Succession" killed yet another community-generated and maintained forum. These businessmen know so little about how driving and preserving culture can be a real moneymaker in a time where everything feels fleeting. Really cool work on this, man, subbed and have your Creator Courses video on the queue!
always white people making comments like this....
I was a mod on the site for a couple years. ~50k iq last i checked. Me and a bunch of the other moderators mostly left the site together and started a big group chat around 2019. We're all still active in the group chat and we all keep in touch. A couple of the guys still use the site but not like they used to and most of us don't use it at all anymore. Was a cool hobby for a while but the staff had no clue what they were doing and it became more frustrating than rewarding fast. Made some lifelong friends from that site and it sucked to see the downfall of it but god they did it to themselves.
Someone could easily make a rival. There's a lot of lyrics sites already, one of them just needs a good annotation userbase.
i signed up for this site back in 2013 just to annotate some lyrics for my favorite Bones songs, i had no idea about more than half of this stuff. i never used to the forum. i only signed up mostly just cuz i liked the idea that you could explain lyric meanings to people who otherwise wouldn't understand them. crazy how there was so much going on behind the scenes for such a simple concept
Bro I watched the whole video, went to click your profile to check out more vids and was blown away to see your subs. From the quality I was expecting like 100k+. Hopefully you get there soon, the talent and quality are already there.
How many times are y’all gonna write this same comment every single time you discover a small channel?
@@cococock2418exactly lol begging for a like from them
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool hip-hop head from NYC. In a fit of frustration with inaccurate transcriptions on Genius one day, years ago, I sat and wrote a complete, accurate transcription of a song in my rotation. I waited weeks or months, checked again, and saw that my annotation had never actually been checked or approved. I tried to find out how to make that happen. Apparently, I had to participate in the community for a certain amount of time in order to level up my account to the point where I could just add a transcription without having to get someone else to approve it.
Til this day, 5+ years later, the version of that song's lyrics is the highly inaccurate one full of nonsense and missed words, while my actually perfect transcription sits on their servers, un-approved.
That is why genius failed. Their model is to use users to build out their product, but they don't actually make that process accessible.
I think that is your opportunity to start something that YOU KNOW ABOUT its sad that white people start companies on black art they know nothing about and bag billions while most of the contributes are black. Start small who knows
what's the song?
oh tea. also that part is subject to abuse of power by some editor/mod who doesn't know better and rejects your version without even checking 😭
I'm an old school Genius editor (going wayyy back) and still write in-depth annotations sometimes, for the same reason - I care about the music, and hate to see those kinds of errors. I still have my account privileges - drop the name and artist, I'd be happy to verify your transcription.
@@crackerjackson detroit's son by guilty Simpson. "buying stamps near" tf
Genius is goofy because people will explain lines like "she give me brain even tho she dumb" like they're clever.
Yeah its kinda funny tho
Like pretty much anytime kanye meantions gettin head its so cringe but ppl act like its deep and thats funny as hell imo
*Ballstate Insurance*
As a musician, I’d prefer Genius to be semi-bound to the labels the artists are working under and that every artist page allows for unique designs so that the experience of reading the lyrics folder the analog way can be successfully transposed.
This is brilliant!!!
Def a great idea. This was always a highlight of buying a CD. Some of the most memorable things were looking through the artwork and seeing how it interacted with the words, and also seeing what font the artist went with. I always felt lucky if there were some written lore stories.
The most memorable booklets I recall were Slipknot and Gorillaz (their self-titled debuts to be specific).
that means that users' annotations would be heavily policed and skewed
@@2fingacriminal Well, that’s Auteur Theory for you.
@@2fingacriminal Considering most annotations on genius are quite ass that just sounds like a positive
I happened across this video just now, curious about a website I’d passively enjoyed for a little while but never dove into. From end to end, I found the story eye-opening, and your brilliant production quality really held my attention. Also - perhaps most of all - I appreciate that you’re interested in tackling new perspectives with this work and committed to addressing your own inaccuracies.
Keep up the fantastic efforts, and I wish you much success with this channel!
Thanks a lot for this comment man, glad you enjoyed it
The fact that this video still only has 11k views is astounding, I hope the algorithm picks this up.
55k now!
It seems to do so 😄
114k now…. the algorithm seems to be working wonders for once 😅
Now it has 1million views🥰, this is what I like about TH-cam, older videos also gets a chance to strive
Can believe they got rid of deconstructed, that was the only outlet for us young producers to pick the brains of our favorite producers or producers that produced hit songs.
bro, 1500 subscribers and already great editing, good audio quality, superb research? i'm proud, keep going!
Thank you!
Jesus your editing feels like it came out of a channel with millions of subscribers. Keep up the grind 💪🏼
You mentioned very early on in the video that they were inspired by the movie "The Social Network". And to me, this already tells me everything I need to know. I hear this, and, yeah! Of course it's going to fall apart! Movies like these are supposed to be a warning, not a damn lesson! This is why somebody telling me that their favorite movie is "The Wolf of Wallstreet" is one hell of a glowing red flag to me...
"Don't model your business attitudes after people who got in massive amounts of legal trouble" doesn't sound like that contentious of a statement, but we live in a very silly world.
I don’t think The Wolf of Wallstreet being someone’s favourite film is a red flag in itself, moreso the reason for it
I like the Wolf of Wallstreet bc its an entertaining and funny warning
I was going to say that! Movies like WOWS, Fight Club, and American Psycho are great movies but a lot of people that love them didnt understood their message at all. Media literacy I guess.
Niggas can't like movies anymore
This video was amazing! You are honestly one of the best upcoming content creators, its very well made. Excited to see you build your video catalogue 😁
Wow, thank you
Wow I had no idea about any of this. I always just thought of Genius as a lyrics company, one that always had the best and most reliable lyrics for a song, often with annotations. I had no idea that the forums were such a core part, or that they tried 100 different side projects based just on the not-that-exciting concept of annotations. This whole video is just proof that any idiots can have a good idea, any rich and savvy idiots can turn that idea into a company, but those same idiots will inevitably drive the company into the dirt.
Damn this was good!! Great storytelling with facts to back it up. The editing was superb. And I learned a lot about Genius and what NOT to do as a company. Glad my cousin sent this to me
I’m 27 and you made me feel so old every time you said most viewers only know genius for the verified videos 😭😭 my earliest memory is around 2011-12 when it was still rap genius and all I did was look up Tyler the creator and Earl sweatshirt OF lyrics 😅
I found your channel on reddit and im surprised with the quality. Youve given me motivation to improve my editing game too and I hope you grow big in the future !
Damn man this is some amazing editing, you definitely deserve more than 2k subscribers I easily see you reaching 200k.
actually incredible video. great storytelling on a niche but interesting topic, good speaking voice, good editing. i was shocked to see you only have 3,000 subscribers. awesome stuff!
Awesome vid. Had no idea Genuis has such a long and interesting history, always thought it was just a lyrics site and TH-cam channel
Crazy to see how things wound up. Me and the homies would be up breaking down Lupe lyrics on Rap Genius like we got paid for it. Was the dopest shit ever.
I didn't even know about "Rap Genius" but your story telling was one of the best I've seen in youtube
amazing video, hope your channel blows up
fr
They had a product that could reliably incite emotions in me almost every time. The euphoria of reading annotations, seeing if you got it right. Watching Deconstructed and really leaning into the producer’s vibe.
Sad to see they fumbled that.
Seems to be an issue a lot of Internet companies fall into. Constant growth. Not just happy to create a good service for a specific interest, everything needs to be a media empire now.
Idk why this was recommended to me, but this is an amazing video. I had absolutely no idea all of this was going on, i thought the site was just to look up lyrics
They won't even allowed leaked songs to have lyrics anymore, when pissy pamper literally went number #1 on genius
Great video! It popped up on my home page so TH-cam is giving it some traction. Commenting to help boost the algorithm.
i hate what happened to genius, because genius is still the best source of lyrics. musixmatch can't even get the lyrics to "rapp snitch knishes" correct ("rap snitch kisses"), it only gets worse the more obscure the song
At least they still have a large volume and cataloge of lyrics. But unfortunately their annotation which made them unique from other lyric websites is outdated or incomplete. Most MF DOOM and other old school song lyrics suffer suffer that fate
This is a fantastic video, super entertaining and informative. I can't wait to see what you do next.
~ also, love the Mr. Robot clip at the beginning.
man.. ballstate insurance is SENDING ME😭😭
did you read the article??
Just started the video but it’s crazy. I was a very active member of the Genius forums, it was a truly special place where hip hop could be discussed in passionate depth.
imo the worst part of their downfall was how horrible the recent site redesign was. seems like everyone who used the site universally hated it because the old design was pretty much perfect for what it was but the new one is unintuitive and makes you scroll way too much. all to create more space for ads of course. i used to love writing annotations but i haven’t used it much since they fully switched to the new design
It went from niggas explaining complex bars to Stunna Girl breaking down "shake that camel toe"😭
nahh after they stopped doing genius deconstructed, thats what killed them. they needa bring that back!
*MAHBOD PASSED AWAY TODAY. I REMEMBER WATCHING THIS VIDEO! JUST CAME HERE TO PAY HOMAGE TO HIM.*
same here
this comment is how I just found out… 🤦🏿♂️
I also feel like the reason why Genius also died was customer service. They used to have good customer service, but they messed it up.
I remembered the breakdown of rap beefs, their instrumental series, etc. should’ve just stuck to that
And that deconstructed series was good
They tried to sell my company an analytics solution where you could see how many times your brand was mentioned in a rap song as a show of relevance. I was like, I don’t think we need that data point but it sounds cool though!
Absolutely beautiful
Doesn’t Genius have… you know, a search bar?
Having ER’s manifesto annotated and Mahbod calling it beautiful is hilariously based
man, I wasnt part of the forum in 2011-2013, but I can remember it so vividly in back in 2014 when rap genius had rnb genius, pop genius and all the other genres on their website and the yellow diamond logo, but for other genres it would be different colors and maan I thought it looked so cool and the concept that every genre had its own site was one of the coolest things to me as a child, i would be on their site for hours and hours just clicking through stuff.
Then, genius verified videos came out at some point when i was a teenager and i was like ,,oh, people don't know genius like that, they don't know how legendary this site actually is''
And then all of a sudden this series became such a hit which was so weird to see for someone who mainly knew them for their website.
I'm so so glad you made this video cause it put everything into perspective for me.
literally just last week i was thinking: man, will people ever know that genius was rap genius, and rnb genius and other kinds of genius as well? I want to see this old site one more time just to reminisce lol
I was so surprised watching this video and seeing that around the time I enjoyed rap genius the most (2013/2014) it was already starting to fall apart which i never wouldve guessed cause i was never on their forum as a early member, man.
It's really sad to see, this site meant so much to me man, it was the only way for me to look at lyrics and start understanding them for what they were, it really shaped my listening experience and it quickly became my favorite thing on the internet as an absolute music lover
Nowadays, when i want to search for lyrics i still look at genius, but it just doesn't feel special at all. The app on the phone is terrible (filled with ads and lags), the website itself doesn't seem to have any interesting articles anymore, even the annotations which was really what made genius iconic for me, have become less and less. I remember being blown away when I would look up a kendrick song back in 2015 and the whole site was colored yellow it was like the craziest thing to see lol
0:20 Heyy, I see you Mr. Robot opening shot. Good stuff
That’s absolutely fucking wild that some people didn’t know about rap genius website lol. Guess it’s a sign that I’m getting old. This video was really informative because I still go on rapgenius for artists I like and wondered why albums are getting little views/annotations over the years. I guess I found out why 🤷♂️
I absolutely love the end of the video as to where they are now.
It's kind of expected for these people.
Holy sh*t!! The quality of this video is amazing! Please keep up making rap-related videos like these 💯
As long as it keeps having lyrics with explanations I'm happy, that's all I wanted
Plus the move from rap-focused to music in general was good
Don't like the videos though, I just ignore them
I always thought it was corny how they ran the site like wikipedia and basically used some arbitrary "IQ" system to motivate people into building the entire lyrics catalog for no money at all
At least Wikipedia is a non-profit, so volunteers' contributions aren't being used to generate ad revenue.
Most free social media have this business model, get users on your site and reward them with internet points whilst blasting ads in between. Everything from instagram Reddit fandom etc
Some people like online points even if it doesn't mean much, I see nothing wrong with that. Besides, the IQ is about the editor's knowledge when it comes to annotating lyrics. If you're responsible for explaining or elaborating a lot of it, then obviously you're a "genius" when it comes to lyrics.
the IQ should be bitcoin that's whaat I wanted
i can’t remember the name of the channel but your editing style with the text to speech reminds me a lot of them. i enjoyed that style and haven’t seen it in a long time, im glad to see you’re doing your own thing with it !
Really enjoyed this video, great mini-doc. Keep up the good work, I look forward to seeing more in future!
I used to absolutely love this site for checking up on lyrics. Nowadays I go on to check an absolute mega hit with millions upon millions of streams and am surprised to see less than 10% of the song has even been annotated. Try to annotate it and the song is "locked". what a shame
Prior to this video, my impression of Rap Genius or now Genius, was just some humble website with a neat Annotation mechanism. I am stunned that it was much bigger than what I initially thought.
Genius was way better when it was just RapGenius
I knew it was over when it became Genius over Rap Genius
Genius Deconstructed was the best series on youtube. So much information and tricks to help producers
Great video man. Super informative and I love the flow aswell as the editing, big props man
A VERY highly produced video for someone with only 2k+ Subscribers. But keep up the good work and I'll just keep on supporting 👌🏿👌🏿
their biggest falloff, in my opinion, is that they stopped doing beat breakdowns
ive never seen this channel before and when i was watching this video i just had assumed this was one of those video essay channels with a couple million subs, how the hell does this channel only have 2k?
One kinda major thing you missed is that the Rap Genius forums is where the term "GOAT" was popularized. Ten years ago you'd see it everywhere on their forums and then only a couple years after would you see it being used everywhere in mainstream culture.
nah def saw GOAT before then especially in gaming
@@Excalibur13 na, you're thinking GOTY (Game of the Year) which is a completely different thing. Same energy but not the same meaning.
nah nah it was def GOAT, greatest of all time, I know it from COD especially MW2 (2009) or Black Ops 1 through Whiteboy7thst on YT. I think it was used in World of Warcraft lexicon too, because it came up in a 2008 documentary called Second Skin about gaming addiction. Which is free on YT too. Stuff I shouldn't remember so well anyway lol
I wouldn’t at all attribute that to RapGenius, the term is old but its popularity comes from the Cool J album. Which came out in 2000.
Swear Tom Lehman of Genius pulled up to YHack 2019. Most annoying ending speech from a company CEO imaginable
watched this in its entirety and then lost my shit at how you have under 2,000 subscribers or how this video isnt ridiculously more popular. this is genuinely amazing content bro keep it up
also this video is 5 months old too which is crazy
Thanks man
I like how Kaney EAST 's songs went on Genius, and the site actually showed the meaning of the lyrics of his songs
The only thing this prove is how out of touch investors in these tech companies are. 200million dollars for a medium sized youtube channel? pfft
your videos are ridiculously good
god damn, i went into this video expecting you to have at least 100k subs. this is amazing quality!
This was a very well produced video dude. Good shit.
I remember their terrible appearance on the Combat Jack show. Bad decision to make themselves the public face of the company. They weren't built for that.
You a real one if you remember that episode. I wish Reggie was still here to see what he started.
@@biggamallafluer2758 he died because he fucked with me... be careful
I've been using Genius for years now. Used to like the insight they provided on lyrics and stuff. Had no idea they had all this dirt on 'em....
I've been in Genius since 2019, way after its heyday, and it's only gotten worse. I remember when Genius got bought by MediaLab. The community was NOT happy. Nowadays, Genius is so ostensibly for-profit, they even advertise their prices for having a front page article.
And also, the new song pages redesign looks ugly.
It was sorta weird that one day when I scrolled down on Spotify there wasn’t anymore facts and quotes from artists anymore. But eventually I stopped noticing it
As an English teacher I used this website a lot in the past and also promoted it to my students. It also had some poetry which was a nice add. I guess I'll have to find something different.
why does who made the website change it for you?
The quality of this video is amazing! Great delivery. Surprised at your sub count, I know it’s only a matter of time til it blows up, your delivery is certainly one that is easy to follow and keeps the listener/viewer engaged.
Thank you
I just knew all these media companies that came out of literally no where (buzzfeed, vox, genius, etc.) were going to fail
I was an editor and then a moderator for a while on Genius and was active for like 8 years on there, was a really fun time, but it evolved into something that felt soul- and passionless. I worked on the Elliot Rodgers Manifesto as well and even though it was known that Maboo was kinda an asshole with a drug problem, that was beyond fucked up.
The platform was beyond ugly, the community became a cesspool of ads, bots & trolling and there was almost no communication with any of the mods either, the international communities were completely abandoned. Every new feature they launched was expected by many to be failures and mostly they were. The focus on video content became apparent early on. Sad to see such a great idea turn into such a great mess
Genuinely thought this was a Disrupt video, down to the text-to-speech readings of names
Good job!!
I am an Editor of Genius, once a regular contributor like many here. If you happened to be a Public Enemy fan and saw some annotations, chances are I either wrote it, edited it, or made suggestions. I wasn't as "keen," or aware, of the activities of the top honchos (such as the Maboo manifesto incident, or the fire sale, Genius Live), other than like many, we were vying to become editors and moderators so we could handle the lyrics and annotations better.
Due to personal reasons, I became inactive a few years ago, but I am slowly becoming active again. I've diversified my genres aside from hip-hop, but as I've discovered transcribing liturgical music, the formatting rules cannot absolutely be uniform. There are some that I agree with, such as making one-bar annotations scarce as possible, but there are times the rules and style guide is... misguided at best. You can't even put Hangul (the Korean alphabet) on a song title! Want to put an all-lowercase title from an artist's song? Too bad, you have to do this and that.
One of the many things I resent is the fact that they changed the site for no reason, but as you all can see, it was just surface level. The forums are still shit, the international community has mostly been left aside (in fact, I am the only editor that's visibly listed for my country), and them focusing on articles and videos (that aren't hosted there, but here on TH-cam as an additional revenue flow) is just like putting make up on a pig rolling in a dirty sty. When they did that, it was game over.
One of the most controversial things to happen in the userbase was the removal of mod role of a prominent user, and well-loved by all communities for his constant coaching and elevation to Editor for several contributors. Many left with him. I stayed out of love for music.
Oh, and the IQ system? Garbage. I use my personal annotations like newspaper tearsheets to add up my writing portfolio, but that's about it.
Loved hearing red dot music's instrumental pop up 😂
Oh man and then award tour 🔥
this is some great stuff man!!! how long does it take you to edit something like this, i.e collect clips,pics etc
Ngl that red handed thing with Google lyrics is kinda cool
4:40 caught me off guard SO BAD LMAOOO