Genius (website)
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Type of site
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Media knowledge base |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Headquarters | Brooklyn, New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | Genius Media Group Inc. |
| Founder(s) |
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| Chairman | Ilan Zechory |
| CEO | Tom Lehman |
| Key people |
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| Industry | Entertainment |
| Slogan(s) | Annotate the world |
| Website | genius.com |
| Alexa rank |
 453 (As of 6 April 2017[update]) |
| Registration | Required for editing |
| Launched | 20 October 2009 (as Rap Genius) |
| Written in | |
Genius (formerly Rap Genius) is an online media knowledge base founded on October 2009 by Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory. The site allows users to provide annotations and interpretation of song lyrics, news stories, sources, poetry, and documents.
Originally launched as Rap Genius with a focus on hip hop music, the site expanded in 2014 to cover other forms of media, such as pop, literature, R&B, and added an annotation-embedded platform. That same year, an iPhone app was released. To reflect these new goals, the site re-launched as Genius in July 2014. An Android version was released in August 2015.
Genius first started as a hip-hop focused site and was originally named Rap Genius. It was created in October 2009 by founders Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory, who met during their undergraduate years at Yale University. Lehman and Moghadam came up with the idea for the site in the summer of 2009 when Lehman asked Moghadam about the meaning of a Cam'ron lyric. After Lehman built the earliest version of the site, Moghadam, a 2008 graduate of Stanford Law School and a first year employee at Dewey and LeBoeuf who was on a paid sabbatical leave, decided to pursue the idea full-time. Lehman, the programmer of the site, and Zechory soon joined him and brought the idea to fruition. Originally named Rap Exegesis, the site changed its name in December 2009 to Rap Genius because "exegesis" was difficult for users to spell.
In October 2013, Rap Genius was one of fifty sites targeted with notices by the National Music Publishers Association for the unlicensed online publication of song lyrics. Unlike Genius, most of the sites that were targeted were ad-supported. In response, Zechory stated that they "can't wait to have a conversation with them about how all writers can participate in and benefit from the Rap Genius knowledge project." In 2014, Rap Genius entered into a licensing agreement with music publishers covering both past and future publishing of music lyrics.
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