PAY YOUR LYRIC TRANSCRIBERS – Genius: Song Lyrics Finder Review

Image my annoyance when I just discovered Musixmatch pays users to properly transcribe lyrics, after wasting hours of my life transcribing, correcting, formatting, editing, annotating, etc lyrics, plus fixing album cover artwork, adding all the missing YouTube & Soundcloud embeds, etc! Genius licenses these lyrics out to services like Apple Music, regardless of how inaccurate they are, and they make mad money off of the work of people like me. You started as yet another lyric & music wiki requiring users to rebuild from scratch, when Genius could’ve easily scraped lyrics for majority of the songs from the plethora of lyric websites available. For all this work, and most of it goes uncredited or gets ignored or deleted by the very few “Editors” with the power to do anything. I initially I got interested in helping on Genius when I was able to pull genius lyrics from the HTML for my basic lyrics widget for personal use (Android), for all the songs that didn’t have lyrics yet, but Genius overhauled their website making this impossible, and has now blocked non-Commercial users from accessing THE LYRICS from Genius’s API!! I mean, what else do I need your API for? If I work for free, and help you make money, you can’t at least allow me to access my own work on a simple music widget when I play music on my phone? Seeing your biggest competitor now offer to pay transcribers after landing a Spotify contract, I feel very taken advantage of. Musixmatch won’t allow me to post lyrics I’ve already transcribed and posted to Genius for “copyright” reasons — eventhough I personally transcribed those lyrics from scratch BY EAR. I guess now Genius owns the copyright for these lyrics they didn’t write, the music rights they don’t own, and the transcription your users created in exchange for some “IQ points” — which only help users access more “editing privileges” on your website that shouldn’t be restricting this access to begin with. Tired of dealing with the awful interface to fix the auto-metadata Genius attaches to every new song (why tag everything as “Pop” genre by default?), painfully add album release date, producer and writer to EACH SONG INDIVIDUALLY, and the confusing way you have to add a new song page under the album tracklist AND THEN drag and drop it to the track number where it belongs — rather than simply letting me TYPE THE SONG NAME INTO THE BLANK TEXT BOX NEXT TO THE TRACK NUMBER. When you got an album where lazies only created pages for 3 songs on a 15 track album — then takes FOREVER. Then I gotta go thru each track & add the publishing date, writer, etc one-by-one — eventhough it’s already in the album metadata. Also, why does Genius not actually use markdown (they incorrectly call it “markdown” tho), or idk, actually provide a a text-formatting editor for the VERY limited formatting options? This adds so much time to transcriptions, especially because Genius requires tons of odd formatting choices for lyrics. None of the formatting, mind you, even makes it to the apps that license Genius’s lyrics! 1-Star until you agree to pay your workers and get your website, web-app, and iOS and Android apps WORKING. Make transcribing and building your entire catalogue of information, knowledge, and our personal annotations from original research EASIER to post. Instead of overhauling the website to literally hide lyrics from the HTML, you should’ve brought your UI out of 2001.
Review by Herrow herrow how low on Genius: Song Lyrics Finder.