Since it was founded in 2009, Rap Genius has emerged as one of the go-to places for annotated lyrics on the Internet. While it's not perfect—a majority of the annotations are based on users' opinions—the founders, Mahbod Moghadam, IIan Zechory, and Tom Lehman, have been hard at work perfecting their system. They've invited artists to personally annotate their songs, and for News Genius, they annotated Newsweek's recent (and controversial) Bitcoin article. To put it simply, they're on a mission to annotate anything and everything on the web.
Complex's Jinx sat down with IIan and Tom while at SXSW, and talked about the future of the project, how it became what it is today, and how one rapper played a part in it. "We started talking to Nas, and realized that the true future of the site, and the true future of annotation in general, is that we got to get the best experts from the world to think about what the line means," Ilan said. "Then we have also got to go talk to the artist."
The founders also dished on the app and new features they've introduced (like annotating this very page.)
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