Why I Left Genius Lyrics: The Importance of Compensation and Communication

Today marks one year since perhaps one of the most infamous events in Genius Lyrics history: the firing of William Goodwin, known online as EwokABdevito. It also marks a year since I left Genius Lyrics after having been an active user since November of 2018. Since then, both of us have filled similar roles to what we had in the past at Everipedia instead. Ewok is a community manager, and I still mainly make articles about obscure music and soundtracks I like with some video games sprinkled in. Both websites are knowledge projects that have a rewards system centered around IQ, with Genius giving IQ points and Everipedia giving IQ tokens. However, the websites couldn’t be more different, especially when it comes to the rewards system, and over the past year my newfound experiences and hindsight have given me some clarity as to a fundamental problem at Genius that allowed things to become as bad as they did. I do not regret my time at Genius for several reasons, but I would like to put all my cards on the table and fully discuss the importance of communication with and proper compensation for knowledge project communities.

So, first things first. What is Genius?

Genius Lyrics, formerly known as Rap Genius, is a website that focuses primarily on the transcription and annotation of the lyrics to songs. Anyone can sign up for an account for free and transcribe (“scribe”) any song by any artist from any genre. You can also highlight any lyric from a song and provide a description of what the lyric means, and submit the annotation (“tate”) for review. Once you have made enough edits on the site you automatically become a contributor, and are then eligible to become an editor. Editorship grants many new abilities, such as being able to review annotations, not having your annotations subject to review, being able to edit the metadata of a song, and getting access to exclusive forums. You also get an invite to the official Genius Slack where you can chat with other editors and mods.

Genius does quite a lot to foster a strong community of people working on the site. The forums and Slack provide a place for users to discuss a variety of topics related to music and other forms of media, and there are consistent events such as red-removal and the Weekly Annotation Competition to keep users engaged. In addition, in order for someone to become an editor in the first place, they are required to work with a previously established editor or mod on improving their tates and bringing them up to a level of quality. This provides an instant connection to the community, and often times editors and mods reach out to new users to help, rather than the inverse. The result is a pretty inviting place to contribute, and a place to meet a lot of incredible friends.

However, I would like to emphasize just how much the community does for Genius Lyrics as a site. Editors and moderators are the main content curators on the site, and they practically run the show. These users are who add the lyrics to songs- the main draw of the site- and often immediately jump on new releases to make sure they are added to the site as soon as possible. These users are the ones who create tates and edit each other’s tates to create as high quality content as possible. They also write bios for songs, albums, artists, and album art. There are some exceptions when the artist themselves decides to submit an official tate or bio, and these artists are officially verified by mods. These users are the ones who mentor new users, as I mentioned earlier, and these users are the ones who run the contests I mentioned earlier. They also polish up lyrics and submit them for official review. Staff members review lyrics and lock them up if they are complete, and they write articles and make the videos that are featured in the news section of the site. However, in terms of content on the site, the vast majority of the work is done by editors and mods. There would not be a Genius Lyrics without the tireless work from this community that Genius has worked to foster.

I am posting this article on Steemit, a website designed as an alternative to social media that rewards users for contributions with cryptocurrency as financial compensation. Everipedia also awards users with cryptocurrency for edits. The currency on Everipedia is known as IQ, and IQ tokens are distributed every half hour proportionally to contribution to the site within that past half hour. Users of both sites hold a strong philosophy that work should be compensated, and they are going to be the main audience for this piece, so as a reader it is most likely that you are wondering how the community is compensated for keeping an entire website afloat.

Well, Genius users are awarded IQ, but the IQ system is not the same one used on Everipedia. IQ points are awarded for different actions taken. Scribes are given 40 IQ, and tates and bios are worth 15 points. Bonus IQ is awarded if your activity achieves a certain amount of views or likes, and there is a page called IQ Bonus where editors and mods can log their contributions and get- well, an IQ bonus. It’s a pretty great system, except for the fact that IQ points serve as nothing more than brownie points and isn’t worth anything.

IQ serves as a way to show how much you have contributed to the site over the course of your tenure. There are leaderboards for IQ points over lengths of time, and reaching certain milestones is a cause for celebration. It’s a lot of fun to earn IQ, and the website incentivizes the earning of IQ to flex. But, the IQ isn’t worth anything. And other than prizes for the contests which are supplied by Genius, the company does not compensate non-staff members for their work whatsoever.

It doesn’t matter that users are contributing as a hobby. It doesn’t matter if you think that a lot of Genius tates are of a professional grade or are truly necessary. The fact of the matter is that Genius is a site that relies almost entirely on the journalism and editing of people who are not being paid a cent for their efforts.

This wouldn’t even seem as biting if the staff members weren’t as distant as they are. Staff members write articles, post updates, and answer questions (most of the time), but they don’t interact with the community often and ignore many of their complaints and requests. A glaring problem on the site is that there are numerous updates that I could list off of the top of my head that Genius needs and that have been brought up time and time again, and Genius always deflects these updates if they require any technical change to the site. The company claims that this is because their servers have minimal bandwidth and cannot handle updates without taking down the servers for several hours. If this is true, then it brings up a big question, and this question revolves around one of the main sticking points for me: the Apple Music partnership.

Apple Music seamlessly integrated itself into the website in 2018, adding a music player to the site that you can access if you have a subscription to the streaming service. The ultimate goal was to have lyrics featured on Apple Music provided by Genius, which lead to the integration of the lyric suggestion feature which allows contributors to provide suggestions for lyrics that can be reviewed by editors and mods. This also led to the submission of complete lyrics to be locked up- so that they can be featured on Apple Music. Why is it that Genius had the bandwidth to pull off this massive integration and feature implementation, but they can’t allow songs to have more than one primary artist?

And before you ask, there is no compensation for the users whose lyric transcriptions are now featured on Apple Music.

I saw these problems brewing for a while, but I didn’t really care, as most users do. The community was amazing. I loved my group of friends I would talk with after school, who I would work with and talk about my favorite music with. I wanted to become a mod, and I would like to mention that at the time the best way to become a mod was to write articles for the site. This was highly encouraged, and once again, no compensation was given other than the extra brownie points. It doesn’t seem to be that way anymore, but it should still be mentioned. All the same, I was excited to try my best, and since I wanted to and still want to get into writing anyway, why not get in some practice? However, there was a point where it couldn’t be ignored anymore.

There was one staff member who not only actively interacted with the community, but fully embraced it: EwokABdevito. Ewok was the one who initially reached out to me in early 2018, and the one who the community would always turn to when questions arose. Ewok was a community manager and did a fantastic job. He ran the mentorship program that allowed people to become editors, by managing a spreadsheet with all potential editors, bringing many users to editorship himself, and helping out other editors and mods when they needed assistance with their own mentorships. He was a true friend to everyone, and never ceased to help with anything from projects to just having a simple chat. He was the backbone of the site. And then, he was fired.

On February 12, 2019, a forum post was made that was very short and very vague. It essentially said that Ewok had left the company and that they appreciated his work over the years, and that was that. The first reply was from Ewok himself, who asked if they could at least tell him why he was fired. From there, everyone was discussing the issue and reaching out to other staff members to ask what happened. A simple explanation would have been enough, but instead Genius did their absolute best to sweep the situation under the rug. They dodged questions for the sake of “Ewok’s privacy”, despite the fact that Ewok also wasn’t getting answers. The staff were determined to wait until things blew over, and eventually they did, but not without sending a bitter message.

Because of this many users took hiatuses or left the site all together, including many of my good friends. Things were fractured, and I learned a hard lesson. Companies like Genius Lyrics can build communities and pretend to serve those communities, but at the end of the day, it is still a company, and users are still a means to an end. Even staff members are not safe from being discarded, and the worst part is it doesn’t even matter. The work that Ewok did has been taken up by other community members, primarily the mentorship program. Now editors and moderators run the spreadsheet for free. Sure, there isn’t that trusted direct line to the staff anymore, but that doesn’t matter, because the community has everything under control. Without Ewok, the site won’t be the same, but it will still produce the high quality content that Genius needs to thrive, and that’s all they need.

No, I don’t regret my time on Genius. It is because of Genius that I discovered my love of writing and my career path, and it is because of Genius that I have made friends I still have today- including Ewok, who introduced me to Everipedia. It’s nice that I can make money off of my work now, and that I can now broaden my horizons and build my portfolio on other platforms as well. However, it still hurts how a website I poured over a year of my time and soul to has ended up treating me and many other users with incredible talents who have been around much longer than I have. The best thing to do now is to hold our friends close, always seek compensation for our work, and turn to new opportunities in a new decade. That’s the best contribution any of us can make.