Hey everyone,

Have you ever wondered what an artist was saying in a song?

To find out what are the actual lyrics are, a lot of services have popped up recently such as the lyrics feature on Spotify, Apple Music or Google. But before that, Genius, an American company decided to take it a step further when they started back in 2009.

In this edition, let me tell you the story of (Rap) Genius.

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 ✍️ The Story of Genius and lyrics matching

Rap’s popularity has been attributed to its authenticity, which is deeply rooted in the lyrics. For many years, fans struggled to understand what an artist wanted to say or the meaning behind a word or expression. The demand increased as rap became the most popular music genre.

Fans & Artists Contribution

Rap Genius was founded in 2009 by Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory, and Mahbod Moghadam. The website was initially intended as a forum for music fans to discuss and interpret rap lyrics. However, it quickly became clear that Rap Genius had the potential to be much more than just a discussion board.

People could annotate lyrics to give some explanation to it, producers could tell the backstory behind the song and even the artists themselves could annotate some songs by clarifying what they meant.

From a lyrics library to a media

Rap Genius gained a lot of traction in the 2010s with its annotations and wanted to expand to other industries by “annotating the world”, or more precisely, annotating the whole Internet. It even created Rock Genius and Poetry Genius, with very limited success.

Then Rap Genius became Genius and was open to more genres, while it changed its focus on becoming a music media. Genius started creating content in 2016 with a series of videos where artists reviewed their own lyrics and explained them. Another popular set of videos were the “Deconstructed”, where we can see the producer’s studio, who explains how they made the song and how the recording session happened, watch this one on Childish Gambino’s Redbone.

Integrating to streaming platforms

While Genius was gaining popularity, streaming services attracted many users and some streaming platforms started using lyrics matching as a differentiator to offer its subscribers lyrics under each song. Genius even partnered with Spotify, where the users could see content from the platform on some selected songs, with anecdotes related to the lyrics or the song. However, some streaming platforms partnered with other services such as Musixmatch, which has a large collection of lyrics, and partners with over 1 million artists, where fans and artists themselves can submit lyrics. Technology companies were competing with Genius to compile the lyrics. Indeed, compiling all the lyrics could be useful for many other use cases in the music industry, such as finding the songs using an artist original lyrics to collect royalties.

Acquisition and shift

Throughout the 2010s, Genius underwent various changes, including legal disputes with Google and unsuccessful strategies. In 2021, Genius was acquired by Medialab for $80 million. It was quite a disappointment for a company once valued at more than $1 billion and backed by renowned investors.

While Genius continues to maintain an impressive library of lyrics and interpretations from thousands of contributors, its recent trajectory appears to have returned to its roots, fostering a strong sense of community while directing attention towards emerging artists. Genius has had a huge impact on the music scene, changing how people connect with and understand music.

Now that you know where to find lyrics, I’ll let you learn by heart your favourite song for Christmas with a little help from Genius. And you can find here the updated playlist and my favorite tracks released in the last few months ;)