Spotify's 'Genius Annotations' Are Painfully Obvious And People Are Cracking Up
People are laughing at Spotify's 'Genius Annotations' for stating some pretty obvious stuff.
Oct. 31 2018, Updated 8:59 a.m. ET
Back before the days of YouTube, people would have to watch music videos on TV, believe it or not.
Now if you wanted to request a video, you'd have to pay a service called TheBox, call it in, and they'd charge your credit car $2 for three music videos or a dollar for one. Otherwise, you'd just watch MTV, BET, or VH1.
VH1 would play older songs a lot of the time, which didn't make it too popular with the younger crowd, but I personally loved it because of one program: pop-up video.
The show wasn't anything special: they'd play popular music videos and little infographics with factoids about the artist, the video shoot, or the song, would appear on-screen. It made watching the videos a little more interesting, and helped to get more mileage out of played-out tracks.
So when I first saw the "Genius" annotations on Spotify, I was immediately brought back to my pop-up video days and a smile crept up on my face. Pretty soon though, I was smiling for a different reason. Because a lot of the annotations were unintentionally hilarious.
Like, thanks for the memo, Spotify.
People can't believe that there are teams of people out there who are writing copy for these song annotations.
Because aside from being blatantly obvious, many of them are so unnecessary.
And you can tell when you've got a different writer. Clearly this person has a much higher standard when it comes to being being a granular, grammar nerd.
Like this religious-themed, deep read into some of Drake's lyrics in "Passionfruit."
Other writers don't care that much for the Toronto-born rapper.
Some of the annotations get "deep emo" out of nowhere - and people are delightfully confused.
There are just little comic gems wherever you look.
People can't get over how savage they are too.
Some of the factoids are just there to blow up artist's spot.
Looks like the P-I-M-P 50 Cent critic is back at it again.
There's even anime-meme reference facts. What won't the genius annotations randomly talk about?
There's never a dull moment.
Ahh, just like the good old days of "pop-up video," but somehow, even more amusing.
