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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Why does that not make them competitors? With the struggles Genius is having I would say they are definitely feeling the competition.
Nobody else has anything like verified artist annotations.
I would love to see you Google or Reddit all definitions individually.. seriously.
Edit: yes, I do correct people's mistakes
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.