[xatan_dank]

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

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

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

[hkmurakami]

Perhaps Ben Horowitz was blinded by his own passion for rap music and relationships with artists themselves and knowing how much was left to be explored and explained... except perhaps most of the world often doesn't share that interest in depth or possess that depth to share in the first place.

[xatan_dank]

I'm someone with a lot of passion for music (especially rap/hip-hop) and its interpretation, and I can't stand Genius. I think that it isn't that people lack the depth of Ben Horowitz, it's that Ben's vision for sharing and cultivating that depth in others isn't very good. Interactive browser line by line annotations are not a silver bullet for achieving rap nirvana.

[pryelluw]

We've been in a bubble. That's why they got so much money.

[SippinLean]

>and attracting actual artists to write about their own lyrics didn't excite me

What?! Up until then it had been speculation. This is one of my favorite features.

>doesn't provide any more value in its annotations than does azlyrics, youtube comments

AZLyrics are almost always a direct copy of Genius, errors and all; and youtube comments?!

>A lot of the time, its annotations are just straight up wrong

so you can (eventually) edit them! What other site lets you do that?

I don't understand how they make money but their site has a lot of value for me.

[fav_collector]

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

[dragonwriter]

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

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

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

[sparky_z]

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

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

So again, what competitors are they talking about?

[Spoom]

Since when was annotating lyrics a competitive business?

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

[sparky_z]

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

[xatan_dank]

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

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

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

[SilasX]

Strange, their AMP version works fine, don't see why they let the desktop get so bloated.

[dragonwriter]

I was actually comparing the AMP version on mobile to several other lyrics sites (I think the performance issues relate to ad loading.)

[SilasX]

Wow, really? I never noticed any lag on Genius AMP (no, not shilling).

[dragonwriter]

It's the only lag I've seen on any AMP, and the ads didn't complete loading, so I assume something to do with ad loading is the issue.

[jonknee]

> Other lyrics sites look and feel like static html sites from the early 2000's

Why does that not make them competitors? With the struggles Genius is having I would say they are definitely feeling the competition.

[MediumD]

Competition isn't the only reason companies struggle. They often are solving an insignificant problem that people don't need a solution for.

[beaconstudios]

I don't think having a more modern design could be classed as a unique selling point. Users often aren't that bothered from what I can tell, if you just want lyrics the fact that the site isn't hyper modern doesn't matter as long as the lyrics are accurate.

[Larrikin]

Its a testament to a site like ohhla.com . I think they've had one site design refresh since 2000, but I don't think there have ever been lyrics on genius that I didn't also find on ohhla.

[zitterbewegung]

Google embeds lyrics in search results see https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=burn%20the%20wit...

[erinniehaus]

The only competitor I have seen is Fiskkit (www.fiskkit.com) which lets readers tag and comment at the sentence level and call out logical fallacies

[jondubois]

It never made any sense. The problem domain is just too trivial/tedious.

[throwaway91111]

Do semantic discussions actually occur on those places? My stomach turned with the idea of just sorting through a single page of what people have to say about lyrics.

Nobody else has anything like verified artist annotations.

[skilled]

That is a totally unfair comment. The value of Genius annotations is unprecedented amongst any competition or similar social sites.

I would love to see you Google or Reddit all definitions individually.. seriously.

[raverbashing]

"its competitors"

Edit: yes, I do correct people's mistakes