via [finance.yahoo.com] 
Rap Genius, a Brooklyn based start-up, is counting on the worldwide infatuation with song lyrics to be instrumental in helping it to create an empire. Ilan Zechory, the cofounder of Rap Genius states, “We started this thing as a hobby, but now we really think we’re going to be the biggest website in the world—bigger than Facebook, bigger than Google, even bigger than Yahoo and CNBC.”
Rap Genius is populated with the lyrics to well more than one million songs. It is very simple to use. Users click on a word or line of a song and a box pops up with an explanation of the lyrics. The explanations, or annotations, can include links, photos, text, and videos and sometimes even the artists themselves.
Zechory told CNBC, “We’re changing the way people consume music.” That may sound like hyperbole but the site is getting serious attention from at least one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley. Additionally, lots of big artists and millions of fans are hoping on the Rap Genius bandwagon.
In 2009, Rap Genius started out as a “hip-hop Wikipedia. Today it boasts more than 25 million users monthly and has expanded to include all forms of music.
Fans that do a search for Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” will find annotations that include references to the Bible, Shakespeare and the “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy.
Rap Genius is free to use and is free of any kind of advertisements. Currently the site produces no kind of revenues for its founders. Zechory, when asked about this issue explains, “Look, you’re asking me to give you answers about stuff that’s just in its infancy. It’s like … ‘Where are you having your bar mitzvah?’ It’s like I’m 1 month old … we’re trying not to overinvest in monetization too early in the way MySpace did versus a Facebook … the product is in its infancy.'”
We are betting that Zechory will monetize his product eventually and end up laughing all the way to the bank.