Rap Genius Put On Notice Lyrics

Everything I ever said about Rap Genius is true, and now finally the guy from Cracker has threatened to sue them into oblivion if they don't cut the crap. Never let go of the 1990s

Rap Genius' business model involves using other people's intellectual property to dominate search results for song lyrics to scam money from investors. This paid off handsomely last year in the form of a $15 million windfall from venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, headed up by Mitt Romney donor Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, son of Southern Poverty Law Center-certified racist David Horowitz

The NMPA, a group that tries to collect licensing fees from scammers on behalf of music publishers, commissioned a study by David Lowery, the guy from Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, who apparently is also a mathematician and teaches music business at the University of Georgia. He might also be one of the guys who wrote an angry editorial about how indie musicians can't make any money from Spotify, not just because relatively few people are interested in listening to indie music, but because Spotify pays an apartheid rate to indie labels. It's somehow even less than what they pay major labels. Because Spotify lives to promote bad music

Lowery used his skills as a mathematician, along with his experience not making any money in the music business (I'm sure it's a good class though), to put together a list of the top 50 lyrics sites that probably haven't obtained a proper license to post song lyrics. The list is in descending order based on which sites turned up the highest search results for names of songs and artists and thus were most likely to make a shedload of money using someone else's intellectual property. Of course Rap Genius topped the list

According to an article yesterday in billboard.biz, the NMPA has sent take-down notices to every site on the list. I checked Rap Genius just now, and it looks like they've still got song lyrics up. So they might get sued. I wouldn't check any of those other sites, lest my five year-old Acer Aspire come down with a virus and I had to put RackRadar, but from what I understand a lot of them are based in Russia and could probably give a rat's ass about your silly take-down notice. If you went over there trying to collect your court-ordered, some mafia guy would just kill you and bribe the police not to call it in.

The NMPA, headed up by a guy named David Israelite (no, really), already sued a sketchy lyrics site founded by one of the guys who founded MySpace for [Austin Powers voice] $6.6 million. If you check the LiveUniverse site now, all you get is that notice from the hosting company saying that the domain name has expired. They couldn't even afford to get that shit renewed. They also sued a company called Motive Force, which ran LyricsWiki, for an undisclosed sum. Really, all you need to know about this guy is that his name is David Israelite. There's basically no way he can lose in court

One of the kids from Rap Genius told Billboard that they shouldn't have to obtain licenses to post song lyrics, because Rap Genius annotates song lyrics, and that's why people visit Rap Genius, right, to have ebonics translated into plain English by people who were born in 1998? He said he couldn't wait to have a conversation about how all songwriters can benefit from Rap Genius, which I took to mean that they plan to invite the guy from Cracker to Rap Genius' offices in Williamsburg, where they'll try to ply him with weed and allow him to awkwardly glance up that one chick's skirt. They pulled the same shit with Chief Keef, who's now in some court-ordered rehab. You can't get court-ordered rehab for weed, right?

They're also trying to argue that many artists were dumb enough to go up there and type in their own lyrics. As explained to me by some young guy on Twitter who assured me he was familiar with the law, if you type your own lyrics into Rap Genius, you sacrifice your right to sue for any money they make from your intellectual property down the line. I tried to explain to these dumbass rappers that they should stop going up there, getting high and typing in their own lyrics, and yet week in and week out I see more and more rappers going up there. Sean Price probably can't afford to buy his own weed

If I were him, I'd try to argue that typing my own lyrics into Rap Genius shouldn't count, because I was high on what I was told was the kind of weed you can buy with $15 million, but who knows what that shit was? Chief Keef smoked it, and now he's locked up in a looney bin with shermheads who got caught wandering the streets naked. Furthermore, how can anyone who works for Rap Genius ever be sure that it was Sean Price who typed in those lyrics. It could have just as easily been Dallas Penn. It's a known fact that they can't tell black people apart

How to Format Lyrics:

  • Type out all lyrics, even repeating song parts like the chorus
  • Lyrics should be broken down into individual lines
  • Use section headers above different song parts like [Verse], [Chorus], etc.
  • Use italics (<i>lyric</i>) and bold (<b>lyric</b>) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part
  • If you don’t understand a lyric, use [?]

To learn more, check out our transcription guide or visit our transcribers forum

About

Genius Annotation

Byron Crawford wrote a post on Billboard’s recent article about the list of 50 take-down notices sent by the NMPA to various lyrics websites (with Rap Genius topping the list.)

Rap Genius co-founder Maboo had some less-than-kind words for Mr. Crawford (via Facebook):

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