Genius CRO Jackie Vignone talks the evolution of the music discovery platform

Since launching in 2009, Genius has evolved into a major player in the music industry, becoming a go-to platform for music fans, artists, and record labels for its lyrics database and discovery functions.

Data licensing and brand partnerships have played a role in that growth. These efforts are being spearheaded by Jackie Vignone, who assumed the CRO title last year, after working at the company and then its parent MediaLab (which acquired Genius in 2021) since 2018.

Revenue Brew sat down with Vignone to discuss these expansions and Genius’s latest partnership with E.l.f. Cosmetics.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How have you seen Genius evolve during your time at the company?

The company has been established for 15 [years] and over those years, we really were a place to look up lyrics and figure out what they meant. I used to say we were the “Wikipedia of music” and a core utility to music fans and artists. What made it work from the beginning was the sense of community; millions of fans adding lots of context and correcting each other and coming together around their favorite artists and what that meant. That’s still a huge part of who we are…

Through the years that I’ve been here, we’ve taken that core fan community and we’ve built an entire content ecosystem around it. We started to mine the data around what that means and the intelligence we accumulated over 15 years. We love to call ourselves the world’s largest canonical source of music knowledge. There’s a lot of music data companies out there, but we feel that our community-driven intelligence gives us a leg up.

What are some of your biggest business priorities as CRO?

This year in particular has been a big refocus on how we get all the different workstreams to work harder for us. As an expansion of this role, I took on our content and our social teams as well, so how do we get content, social, brand partnerships—which is a huge core part of our business—and our music intelligence to all work really well together?

The first thing we do is really expand our team. I elevated someone underneath me to help oversee brand partnerships who has been with me for a while and understands that business has shifted…We think about our brand partnerships business as a core set of clients who have music and youth culture as a part of their core strategy.

This year has been a lot of building and setting really good foundational habits, incorporating AI and how we use all the new tools at our advantage. Brand partnerships is still a core part of that business and how we think about working with brands, but our music intelligence and our data side of our business is starting to come into play more as we think about what we have to offer and the changing landscape.

How have you been expanding into areas like brand partnerships and data licensing?

Our data licensing business has been in play. We have a really deep relationship with Apple Music that we’ve had since I’ve been here, and that relationship has continued to expand. We think about how we are leveraging our community to give them more lyrics and to support their platform. Apple is obsessed with quality over quantity, so they come to us for all their new release data, and we just continue to expand that partnership and nurture that business.

We’re also working much more closely with our label relationships, and we are able to display lyrics. Lyrics are a complicated business, but labels don’t have lyrics, so we work closely with labels to basically sell back the lyric data to them. While the lyrics are technically theirs and they have the rights to the publishing of those lyrics, they actually don’t have the data, the actual lyrics. We then license back the data to them. That’s something we’ve always done.

What are some of the biggest revenue drivers for Genius?

Brand partnerships continue to be a big part of our revenue. This year we’ve seen some growth in that area, about 25% year over year. Our audience and community and core platform continue to be a big part of our revenue. Our site metrics have been up year over year, as well as our monthly viewers. All of the advertising that you see on the platform continues to be a big driver. Data licensing and our relationship with that world has been a growth area for us. We expanded that this year with a relationship with Spotify that just launched weeks ago. Then that music artist relationships part of our business powers everything, so how we think about our artist-facing opportunities through brand partnerships through our consumer platform is also a big part of our revenue strategy.

How did the partnership with E.l.f. Cosmetics come together and how do you think they benefited from it?

E.l.f. came to us to help support the launch of Mirror Mix, which is their second original album spotlighting original artists…When it comes to music partnerships, everyone who has a music strategy will partner with a streamer because you need somewhere to listen to music. Genius is the music partner that comes in addition to that to add context and the tangibility of what that culture is and that connectivity to the music.

We decided to bring that IP series to life with an open mic live, s bringing the stage to an event at their headquarters, where we invited hundreds of fans for this intimate, stripped back setting featuring the artists that were on their album. The takeaway from that is we take content and make sure it lives on. The beauty of anything is that it’s one thing to work with an artist and to create an amazing album and to tell their story in a live setting, but only so many people can see that experience. In this case, it’s around 250, so creating content and letting it live on throughout our distribution channels—which are all owned and operated—is a huge benefit to them because we have 135 million people who come to the site every month.

How do you think that partnership highlighted Genius’s capabilities?

A lot of brands will come to us and say they’re really having a hard time finding music audiences. They could find it via audio and streaming platforms, but that’s a very different experience. Something like E.l.f. allows us to really play into the idea that Genius can give a brand both the music lover, the fan, the artist, and the community that we’ve created and create unique partnerships that leverage those relationships.

If you’re looking to reach youth culture or music is a part of your core strategy as a brand, it’s one thing to have an audio strategy, but it’s another thing to work with a company like Genius to find the right artist and have our artist relations team book that artist and license the music for you and clear the music and contract that artist.