...valiers owner and Quicken Loans magnate Dan Gilbert), it felt a bit like the embattled startup’s response to Google’s newly asserted dominion over lyric searching. Just like Knowledge Graph relies on old-media sources like encyclopedias, it appeared that Genius was going to significantly augment its crowdsourced annotation efforts with some good old-fashioned expert critical knowledge.
Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork
9 years
... assume an executive editor position at Genius (which has dropped the "Rap" as part of its ongoing expansion and which has acquired nearly $60 million in two rounds of funding, the latest coming from Cleveland Cavaliers owner and Quicken Loans magnate Dan Gilbert), it felt a bit like the embattled startup’s response to Google’s newly asserted dominion over lyric searching. Just like Knowledge Graph relies on old-media sources like encyclopedias, it appeared t...
Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork
9 years
This past January, when The New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones announced he was leaving the magazine after 11 years to assume an executive editor position at Genius (which has dropped the "Rap" as part of its ongoing expansion and which has acquired nearly $60 million in two rounds of funding, the latest coming from Cleveland Cavaliers owner and Quicken Loans magnate Dan Gilbert), it felt a bit like the embattled startup’s...
Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork
9 years
...y boosting Rap Genius’ search results. Google wasn’t happy upon hearing of the trick, however, and took the extreme step of temporarily banishing Rap Genius to the far catacombs of its search results—a "time-out" for bad search-query behavior. Almost exactly a year later, Google intervened in the lucrative lyric-searching market in a different, much more direct way: For lots of (but not all) lyric queries, Google now returns an embedded re...
Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork
9 years
...ious lyrics-annotation startup Rap Genius instituted what it called a "blog affiliate program." In exchange for bloggers posting links to individual Rap Genius song pages—a page per track on an album—the platform would link back to their blogs. In essence, this SEO quid-pro-quo was a way of tricking Google into artificially boosting Rap Genius’ search results. Google wasn’t happy upon hearing of the trick, ho...
Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork
9 years
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