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Created
The original site was thought up and created by Yale undergraduate students Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory. -
Name Changed
The name of the site was changed from Rap Exegesis to Rap Genius because the former was harder to spell -
Podcasts
Outside the Lines With Rap Genius was created, a podcast hosted by Rap Genius's Editor-in-Chief, Shawn Setaro. -
Music Video Annotations
Rap Genius begins to also annotate various music videos. -
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First Novelist To Annotate Their Work On the Site
Author Bacchus Paine, became the first novelist to annotate their work on the website, opening doors for many others. She used photos taken at events like Folsom Street Fair, which are featured in the novel. -
Controversy
Source The editors of RapGenius were criticized for racially indecent banter in a chat room on the website -
Legal Dispute
Rap Genius was given a notice by the National Music Publishers Association for the unlicensed online publication of song lyrics. They were able to argue that the artists are involved on the site as well and got past the dispute -
Google Penalization
Google and RapGenius have had many disputes. At this point in time, RapGenius was penalized by the searching site for their shady link-building, and took them off of the search engine until RapGenius fixed the issue. -
Landed Licensing Deal with Universal
RapGenius landed a licensing deal with Universal Music Publishing. This opened up doors to include more of a variety of music on their site. -
First iPhone App
After many requests from fans, the first ever Rap Genius app fr iPhones was created for mobile use of the site.