Hack The News: Genius

Hi Genius! I’m a huge fan. And anyone into music probably regards you as one of the leading sources of music news.

You guys are recognized for, “bringing music intelligence to the masses” providing a massive database of song lyrics, powered by user-generated explanations and insight into what the artist is trying to express.

In the past few years, however, your in-house team has taken this music intelligence to the next level, interviewing artists, breaking down their lyrics on camera, breaking down their craft.

Genius, you give us a new perspective on music. I deconstructed seven of the stories from your site, and then redesigned them with seven new technologies that I believe could enhance your music coverage, and transform our favorite artists into journalists, philosophers, and more importantly: people.

#1. Deconstructed + Virtual Reality / 360 video

The video series, Deconstructed, is a filmed interview of the producer behind a hit song. In the interview, which takes place in the producer’s recording studio, the producer takes viewers through the process leading up to the song’s completion. As seen in The Making of Drake’s “The Motto” with T-minus, this not only includes a dissection of the individual instruments and sounds within the music itself, but also the feelings and thought process of the producer during this important time of their career and their collaboration with the other artists that appeared on their work.

Deconstructed puts viewers directly in a producer’s setting, it’s private and personal yet also professional. It almost feels top secret. For artists, the studio is a very sacred place, and this is what I think viewers should appreciate about these videos the most. This experience, this idea of spending time with producers actually working on their music in their studios, should be enhanced even further with virtual reality.

With VR, viewers could put on a pair of goggles (even cardboard ones!) and be in a 360-degree view of a studio with a producer while they break down their beat as they’re filmed on a 360-video camera. They could turn their eyes, and look at the vast amounts of equipment and screens, all while listening to the song and getting its creator’s breakdown of what made it so timeless.

“The unexplored power of this kind of filmmaking”, said New York Times Journalist Ben Solomon, “is in directing people’s attention.” Solomon directed the 360 video “The Displaced”, which followed three children living in refugee camps in Ukraine, South Sudan, and Syria. “When you think about film, it’s just shots and moving them around. But theater is about getting people to ‘look over here!’ using light and sound to move their attention. I think VR has a lot of that blocking potential.”

The Deconstructed video of Ludwig Göransson is unique, because the artists used a wide range of different instruments to make Childish Gambino’s song “Redbone”. Throughout the video, he plays each of these instruments individually and puts them all together in front of the viewers eyes. A scene like this, remade with VR, could have viewers looking all around a studio as an artist like Ludwig worked with these instruments.

“In 360 videos, you film scenes of relatively long duration, as opposed to short shots,” said Veda Shastri, who created a 360 video of the Chernobyl disaster with Frontline NBC and NYU.

Longer, 360-degree shots can provide a more explorative but linear process of music production that users can follow along with like they’re actually there. They capture live action and energy in real-time.

People enjoy step-by-step videos (cooking, make-up, How It’s Made). Deconstructed takes music production to a deeper level, and this can be brought to fans in an even more realistic and hands on experience with VR.

#2. Drones + IRL

IRL videos show an interview with a musician while doing a “real life” activity that is unrelated to their music career — like singer SZA going to a ranch and horseback riding while sharing inspiration behind her newest album.

An IRL video like the one with SZA is a perfect example of a video that could be enhanced with shots captured with drone technology.

According to Benjamin Mullin for Poynter, drone shots enhance the quality of events — even for broadcast like CNN’s drone shots of the beautiful Reagan Library during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Drones can, “show perspective, breadth, and scope.”

This can open up the opportunity to bring audiences to more scenic and interesting locations, especially the outdoors.

Aerial shots look great, and it’s an appealing new perspective for viewers. It’s also more inexpensive. They can range anywhere from $50 to $1000, plus a $150 aernotautical knowledge test by FAA for $150 (which is difficult, and should definitely be studied for online).

Compare this to the difficulty of hiring a helicopter for a minimum of $200-$300 an hour. And “until now, anyone wanting to fly a drone for commercial purposes was required to get a recreational or private pilot license”!

Many journalism companies are starting drone units of their own, and using it to give a new perspective to journalism, like for example looking at disaster zones and other inaccessible areas.

I believe that, in regard to IRL videos, they can enhance Genius’ coverage of artists on visually appealing and interesting getaways for fun adventures in the outdoors, while working around an artist’s busy schedule without a having helicopter blaring above them.

Shelley Hepworth provided information about the new drone rules here, and of course, safety is the first priority (a drone is a “flying lawnmower”). Also, there are various rules to study (you can’t fly at night, or over populated areas), and laws about drone use vary by region (you can’t fly a drone more than 8 feet high in Texas).

#3. Games + Hip-Hop’s Love For Nintendo Samples

Tracing Hip-Hops Love for Nintendo Samples is a video highlighting the countless hip-hop artists and producers that have used samples of Nintendo video game soundtracks in their songs.

A video like this could utilize a new technology in journalism that plays off of its topic: video games.

Users could play as 8-bit musicians and solve puzzles or defeat enemies, while the sampled Nintendo songs play on various stages, and text and objectives inform users about the song, the game it sampled, and the artist.

Interactive, entertaining, and informative, a game designed around this story could tie together the relationship between Nintendo and hip-hop even further than just a video.

According to Maxwell Foxman, we have always “played with the news” — through comic strips, crossword puzzles, etc. And, both news and games hold spots on our internet and our social media.

Digital games play off of this idea, using badges, points and leaderboards to motivate readers as they inform them. The idea of earning a sort of point system is an engaging feature for users, that brings them back to a site to compete against their own scores and the scores of others.

Nieman Lab calls it “harnessing the power of video games”, stating that companies have already been using games in their business strategies to attract people. “Power suppliers rate your energy efficiency compared to other households… health insurance companies encourage you to rack up points by exercising… Foursquare encourages users to regularly check into their favorite spots so they can ‘win’ and be named the mayor.”

Given Genius’s largely social media following, a game could be an effective link to draw users into the site (a large percentage of the clickers are likely on social media, and they have free time to catch up on their music… or play!)

Jack Shepherd, a manager at Buzzfeed, feels that the way to engage users “wasn’t to sit around and assign stories based on what we thought were important stories of the day, but instead to kind of delve into what was going on on the internet and try to come up with original stuff that would spread socially.” And music and video games already have a connection, and a presence on social media. Tying them together could provide an experience, informing users about the music production and engineering process with less words and more fun.

#4. Hip-Hop Billboard & Animation

In 2017, Hip-Hop made up the largest percentage of the Billboard Hot 100 ever. Genius wrote a story and provided a link to an interactive chart by Orbitz — detailing Hip-Hop’s rise in the charts since the 1990s. Also listed were some of the top songs in Hip-hop this year.

Using simple animation in a journalistic style could take data like this and streamline it into a visual experience for fans, even incorporating clips of songs as well, as the charts over the years move across the screen.

Jackie Lay, an animator and journalist for the Atlantic, creates simplistic yet beautiful animations to explain different statistics and science, combining moving illustrations, graphs and numbers, and even live footage as well (see some of her work here).

Animations like these are not necessarily high tech, but journalists are using them more and more to present information in a more absorbable way. Switching things up like this can take various datasets or reports and give them numerical value in a new light.

Even political topics, like how voting works, can be made into an animated video (do you want to know how union concessions work?) to “go down easier”. While reading news, I have turned to a lot of animated reconstructions of different topics to understand them in a visual format, which I find is much easier to retain in my memory.

Reading information, like on the war in Syria, is overwhelming. As a reader, one has to not only absorb a lot of information, but also mentally visualize its position amongst other information. An animation can do this process for you, showing information as an image or a shape, and moving it to express something about it. To explain this easier, simplistic animations in journalism are attempting to visualize what our thought process is already trying to accomplish.

With the music industry, there are a lot of topics involving numbers and charts that I feel can be refreshed with animation. This is especially true because, with music in particular — this info is already attainable with charts, an already widespread method of expressing numbers with graphics. Now to make them move!

#5. Spotify fact tracking + wearables

One of the coolest features on Genius is their partnership with the Spotify streaming service, bringing people real-time analysis of a song’s lyrics while listening to it. This allows users to learn about the music they’re experiencing anywhere they go.

With this in mind, I believe that Genius and Spotify’s Behind the Lyrics could go even further, with the words actually leaving people’s screens and taking a place in the world around them with wearable technology.

An article by Tech Crunch showed Apple combining their Maps App with augmented reality to create animated arrows floating on your screen amongst your surroundings, so that as you pointed your camera around you, arrows showed you where to turn to reach your destination. If combined with a wearable set of goggles, like Microsoft Hololens or Google glass, this tech is capable of giving users real-time information as they simply look around.

Ikea Place is an AR app which allows users to place different pieces of furniture in a room to test out how they look before a purchase.

Imagine someone listening to a song on Spotify, putting on a headset, and seeing lyrics and words following their eyes around their room, or the train, or the library. Having these lyrics displayed like this provides more presence and reality to them. Interactive content is on the rise with apps like Snapchat and Jig Space.

Although visual wearables have not yet seen the same increase, major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are partnering with startups like Magic Leap to make this a reality in the near future. Until then, AR like Snapchats filter features are a perfect field to combine with a responsive project like Behind the Lyrics, with information constantly flowing in a 3–4-minute period of a song. Making this experience interactive can add a personalized and learning experience for listeners.