Stuart Dredge 

Rap Genius raises $40m for move into history, sports, literature and more

US startup rebrands as Genius: 'Any text can be as layered, as allusive and cryptic, as worthy of careful exegesis as rap lyrics...' By Stuart Dredge
  
  

Besides rap, Genius now offers annotated history, sports and literature documents.
Besides rap, Genius now offers annotated history, sports and literature documents. Photograph: PR

US startup Rap Genius made its name with a website for hip-hop fans to explain the lyrics of their favourite tracks, before expanding to provide similarly-crowdsourced annotations for poetry, rock songs and news stories.

Now the company has raised $40m in funding to fuel further expansion into pop music, history, literature, sports, television and films, rebranding itself as Genius to match its wider focus.

In a blog post, co-founders Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman describe the move as inevitable. "Any text can be as layered, as allusive and cryptic, as worthy of careful exegesis as rap lyrics," they wrote, as the funding was announced.

"Furthermore, it’s simply not possible to create a website that annotates rap alone, just as it’s not possible to create a website that annotates any individual slice of human culture—because no slice of human culture stands on its own."

The funding round included venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which had led a $15m round for Rap Genius in 2012. Financial mogul Dan Gilbert also chipped in to the new round, in a busy week that also included re-signing US basketball star LeBron James to his Cleveland Cavaliers team.

Alongside the new funding, Genius unveiled plans to launch tools to embed its technology on other sites, which Zechory and Lehman said "will allow anyone to make their website annotatable".

Raising more money was essential for more than just new subjects and tools. In the last year, Genius has been signing licensing deals with music publishers for the rights to carry their lyrics on its site, agreeing to pay them royalties.

As Rap Genius, the site topped a list compiled for US trade body the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) in November 2013 of websites engaged in "blatant illegal behaviour" by publishing copyrighted lyrics without licensing deals.

Rap Genius reached a settlement with the NMPA in May 2014, and has also signed deals with major publishers Warner/Chappell, Universal Music and Sony/ATV.

$40m of new funding will help the company pay those royalties, while figuring out how best to make money from its large audience on the web, and in its recently-launched iPhone app.

It remains to be seen what Apple makes of the company's rebranding as Genius, given that its own iTunes store's tool for recommending music, apps and other purchases to customers is also called Genius.

The company's expansion shows its grand ambitions. "'Genius' is the term you should add to your Google searches whenever you’re looking for deeper meaning and context," wrote its co-founders as the news was announced.

"Genius is the verb you can use to describe looking something up on Genius or decoding something in general... We believe that an Internet that is Genius-powered will help us all realise the richness and depth in every line of text."

As Rap Genius, the company courted controversy several times. In December 2013, it clashed with Google over its approach to search engine optimisation (SEO).

The site was demoted in Google's search-engine rankings and lost up to 80% of its daily traffic over Christmas, but after admitting to SEO practices that were "more or less totally debauched" and changing its ways, the ranking was restored.

In May 2014, the site's third co-founder Mahbod Moghadam resigned after fierce criticism of his annotations of a manifesto, published online by Elliot Rodger before he killed six people in California that month.

Moghadam described the manifesto as "beautifully written" and guessed that Rodger's sister must be "smokin hot", and despite apologising publicly, was forced to resign as Lehman criticised his "gleeful insensitivity and misogyny".

'We're trying to make Rap Genius into Everything Genius'

 

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