Why rap genius

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Free: Join the VentureBeat Community for access to 3 premium posts and unlimited videos per month. The best way to have good ideas is to have bad ideas. Your anxiety and fear of judgment will stop you every time.

But there is one area where you do need to be critical — viciously critical even, he says: prioritization. Once we know we want to do something, our goal is just to get it out there. You are the dumbest you'll ever be right now. And that's actually kind of inspiring. Early on, Lehman prioritized a feature that would enable users to add a confidence score to their annotations.

For example, it occurred to him that two users could very well be editing the same annotation on a song at the same time. So the site would need a conflict resolution mechanism. Just do the shittiest thing you have to do. Users add annotations to explain the lyrics, vote on other explanations or suggest edits to lyrics if they've been added incorrectly. These users form a community, organized through forums, email lists and private relationships, where they can earn status and even become moderators on the site.

Part of its success in garnering the attention of search engines is its ability to generate individual page links for every line of a song that's annotated. As a result, a single track can have a dozen or more pages-each containing a discussion of the particular line it's attempting to explain.

Search experts point to other things that Rap Genius appears to be doing well. It's very well-built. And it has very high-quality in-bound links, which means high-quality sites are linking to it. They've given it every advantage. In addition, Rap Genius' community, with its verified artists acting as an anchor, serves to generate social media attention.

Look at AZ's branding versus Rap Genius'. AZ doesn't even feel like a real company or have any type of consistent logo. But while Rap Genius is doing everything right from a site-building perspective, it's tripped on some cultural backlash. Asked about negative press, the added pressure of a multimillion-dollar investment in their business and its legal copyright issues, the Rap Genius founders abide by Lil Wayne's song "No Worries" and shrug them off.

Instead, they're looking toward a massive Our employee body is going to grow from 30 to hundreds. We're going to be the biggest website in the entire world-bigger than Facebook, bigger than Twitter. Search term. Billboard Pro Subscribe Sign In. Top Artists. Gaming search results with spammy SEO tactics is certainly deplorable, but wiping Rap Genius off of top result pages for queries that include its own name is pretty harsh.

Whether the startup deserves it or should get a lighter punishment depends on your perspective regarding the sanctity of Google search results.