This Week 5.25.18

Genius and The Long Game

This Week is a column from TGYN where various members of the TGYN community sounds off about what’s on their mind. It comes out weekly. Thus the name.

Lyrics have long been important to me in music. I don’t want to say that they’ve been more important than the music itself, but it might be close. The first band I ever really got into, The Barenaked Ladies, are famous for their playful, funny, and then all of a sudden surprisingly poignant and emotional lyrics. When I first got into rap and hip hop it was because of the lyrics — the verbal acrobatics that were on display.

It’s probably not surprising that I often didn’t understand what some of these rappers were talking about. For example, Young Jeezy would regularly go into detail about specific drug deals, cocaine prices, and indications of quality. As a 16 year-old middle class high school student in rural America, quite a bit of that went over my head.

In an effort to understand, I would ask people I knew if they knew what Jeezy was talking about. They didn’t. Then I would head to forums and lyrics sites to try to and figure it out myself online. Sometimes this led to results, but even if it did those results were typically incomplete and lacking.

Then, at some point during college, someone introduced me to Rap Genius. Not only did it have just about every song you could think of in its archives, the songs were annotated with long explanations that provided context and background. It was a dream! In the years since then, the site has grown in prominence and popularity, the tech behind the annotations has been outsourced to places like the Washington Post, and artists often work directly with the site to ensure their lyrics are accurately represented.

Rap Genius, now known as just Genius, is the premier place to discover, discuss, and debate lyrics. But it wasn’t always that way.

In a recent interview on the Digiday Podcast, Ilan Zechory, President and co-founder of Genius, talks about how long it took for the company to become what it is today. There are some obvious issues, like growing the catalog of songs and ensuring accuracy. Over time, as their community grew and their processes developed, this became less insurmountable and more automatic. Then there are less obvious but more problematic issues, like not showing up in Google’s search results because of the age of your site and the magic (or lack thereof) of the search algorithm.

Other lyrics sites, incomplete, inaccurate, and obviously inferior, would show up before Genius when you searched lyrics for a number of reasons. They’d been around longer. They had a larger catalog. Who knows what else. Searching for lyrics is obviously one of the core ways that consumers find lyrics sites, so this hurt Genius’ traffic and its business. It served as a huge barrier to growth.

But Ilan talks about how, while that bothered him, his team didn’t try to engineer a bunch of SEO (search engine optimization) tricks to ensure that Genius would slide into the top spot. Instead, they focused on continuing to create a quality product and dove further into the process of making a lyrics site that gave a passionate community an excellent product in exchange for their ongoing support, assistance, and attention. They thought that if they did that, they would eventually vault to number one.

They were right. Eventually Genius did become the preeminent place for lyrics, and it did become the top search result. After years of not producing revenue, Genius is now focusing on how to capitalize on the relationship it’s built with both artists and fans to make some real money. They’re doing video, developing deep partnerships with music streaming services, and becoming an ingrained part of consuming music.

But as they grow the business, they’re remaining committed to the core product. It took a long time for them to grow Genius to the place it is today, and they’ve been hyper-protective of the community. They’re reaping the benefits of that attitude now because they’re built on a solid product, hard work, expertise, and authenticity.

I’d definitely suggest taking a listen to the podcast, and then thinking about that concept as it applies to your own projects, business, artistic endeavors, and all else. Don’t chase what’s popular just because it’s popular. Become an expert in what you do, and then work hard to perfect it. In 2008, who might have guessed that cataloging rap lyrics would be a successful, potentially lucrative money making ten years down the line? At the same time, wasn’t it obvious that something like Rap Genius was needed, that there was a space for it in the ethos?

You don’t always know which of your passions could eventually lead to success, but working hard and playing the long game is almost always going to yield better, more sustainable results than taking shortcuts. Invest in your projects, your job, whatever, and it will very likely reward you eventually.

On to the recs!

In the spirit of providing you That Good You Need, here are a few things I’d recommend checking out.

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