Why (Rap) Genius Poached Sasha Frere-Jones From The New Yorker

Hint: It’s not for a new beard-maintenance vertical

Sasha Fierce-Jones is the guy who declared rap music dead, around the time the Blueprint 3 came out (which turned out to be true).

This led to a minor beef with Indian rap group Das Racist, which once famously called Rap Genius “white devil sophistry.” Rap Genius responded by saying one of the guys from Das Racist looked like a burnt cigarette.

No one annotates anything on Rap Genius other than Justin Bieber songs and whatever garbage is currently poppin’ on hip-hop radio.

Legally, it’s supposed to be user-generated content, in order to avoid having to pay for using someone else’s intellectual property. That’s why they make bum rappers type in their own lyrics when they visit the Rap Genius offices, in exchange for copious amounts of free weed, which they keep in a black Hefty bag.

They’ve since struck deals with all of the major labels, i.e. like all three of them, so pretending to contain user-generated content is neither here nor there. These deals are similar to the deals the TIs struck with Spotify, in that the labels will receive a substantial windfall if/when Rap Genius experiences a “liquidity event,” of which the artists themselves will receive Jack Schitt.

That’s why they allow streaming services to give away songs for free. It used to be, you could listen to like three songs for free (and none on the mobile version) and then you’d have to fork over your credit card information. Now you can basically use Spotify for free and only have to listen to a commercial every now and again.

The purpose of giving away someone else’s intellectual property for free is not because they actually make money running commercials for some shit they probably don’t even sell where you live every 45 minutes; it’s to drive the number of users. The value of the company, in an IPO or if it’s bought out by another company, will be some multiple based on the number of users.

According to some young guy on Facebook this morning, Rap Genius’ traffic has been stagnant since it changed its name to just Genius last year, a few weeks after they dropped co-founder Mahbod Moghadam like a bad habit, supposedly because he said Isla Vista spree killer Elliot Rodger’s manifesto was “beautifully written” and speculated that his sister was “smokin’ hot,” the latter of which was later confirmed.

No one actually likes Rap Genius, they just click on it because it’s one of the top results for a search for seemingly any song lyric. That’s why their traffic is so static: search engine traffic tends to be the same month after month, unless there’s a spike for some reason — life if you were up on Mia Khalifa before it was all trendy.

Why would anyone pay $400 million for a site that’s almost completely dependent on Google for traffic, let alone one that’s already been kicked out of Google for running SEO scams? Traffic will never go up and hence, best case scenario, the stock price will remain the same, making it a worthless investment, if not a catastrophic failure.

Worst case scenario, they can just plaster the site with banner ads and probably make quite a bit of money in perpetuity and/or until a better solution comes along. So they’re not completely shit out of luck. (And let’s keep it real — they were probably all rich to begin with.) This is just a last-ditch attempt to avoid becoming the equivalent of a circa 2006 spam blog, however lucrative that would be.

I don’t think you’d bother trying to poach a writer from such a high-profile publication, for which I’m sure they had to back up a Brinks truck, unless you were at least kinda desperate. If this was just about finding someone who knows from rap music to finally annotate some Freddie Foxxx songs, they could hire any number of dumbass kids from The Coli for less than minimum wage. They’ve probably got enough money to annotate every song there ever was. Do Indian people know about rap music? I mean, aside from Das Racist.

You pull a stunt like this to signal to investors and the media that you’ve essentially failed as a company but they shouldn’t add your name to the dead pool just yet.

They tried something similar last year, with embeddable annotations, and it didn’t go anywhere. Nas is literally the only person to embed Rap Genius annotations on his site, for Illmatic XX, and that’s just because he got duped into coming on as an investor/paid black cosigner. They approached the New York Times about embedding annotations there, and the New York Times was like, you can’t be serious, right? Since-disgraced co-founder Mahbod Moghadam called the New York Times “Carlos Slim’s ho” in the same interview where said that Mark Zuckerberg could suck his dick — none of which, I’m sure, had anything to do with him being let go.

And now here the New York Times is with an exclusive, largely uncritical story on the Sasha Frere-Jacques acquisition. Coincidence? Similarly, Cleveland Cavaliers owner “Subprime” Dan Gilbert’s $40 million investment in Rap Genius, which coincided with the site changing its name to just Genius, was announced in an exclusive article on Business Insider, which is owned by Marc Andreessen, the guy who gave Rap Genius that initial $15 million. Come to think of it, that article may have had embedded Rap Genius annotations. So I was wrong about that. Still, it was someone with a stake in Rap Genius. The point remains: no one wants to use Rap Genius.

And presumably, that’s the other reason they brought in Sasha Fierce. Rap Genius has been regarded as a joke since it hit the Internets, but let them start throwing some money around… I’m sure people are already poking out their asses for a chance to cash in, as Yasiin Bey might put it.

Back when they first got that 15 Milli, they were loathe to cut a music writer a check, try as Combat Jack might. Remember when he used to refer to them as his dear, dear friends, while they were shitting on Dallas Penn on Twitter? I’m sure that was awkward. It’s only right that they kick him a few dollars to explain the lyrics to Rawse’s Mastermind.

A while back, one of the guys from Bleacher Report started a similar content farm for feminists. A few critics pointed out the irony of a man paying girls slave wages to create a fake feminism website, just so he could sell it off for hundreds of millions and not give them a damn thing. Then he just went out and hired a few girls for what probably amounts to less than minimum wage, and we’ve heard nary a peep ever since. Even girls who don’t work there don’t want to run the risk of getting blackballed. They’re so easy to corrupt because they think they honestly deserve to earn a full-time salary plus benefits to criticize other girls’ outfits on the Internets.

I can’t imagine music journalism will be any more difficult to corrupt. There’s a lot of money in feminism websites, because girls make more money than guys these days, and girls always have made the purchasing decisions in households, which is why guys keep starting them. There never was much money in music journalism. I heard back in the day labels used to send critics shedloads of albums which they could then sell to record stores (though presumably not to ensure positive reviews), but I wouldn’t know. I was only born in the ‘80s. These days, Nike will send you free shoes, which some people just sell on eBay, but what does that have to do with music? The music is just a tool to get the shoes. You don’t have to praise any artist in particular, you just have to come off as a shill.

All Rap Genius has to do is pay a small handful of guys the equivalent of $4.35/hour, and maybe pay one or two guys way more than that, for psychological purposes. The rest of the music-writing Internets will fall in line, if only because what if one of those other guys has to quit to move back in with his (or her!) parents and rub lotion on the elderly for a living? Some people will be shilling for free. But rest assured that everyone will be shilling. Only narcissism would lead someone to believe that they should be able to make a living explaining what “No Flex Zone” is about. The purpose of bringing in Frere-Jacques et al. is to send out a message, and when you take money from a company to deliver a message that’s not journalism, that’s advertising.