About a month ago, we started testing Lyric Approval tools for Editors and Moderators in the @genius-editorial-board. If you already know what lyric approval is, great! If you don’t, here are the basics…

Lyric approval is a two-fold process. Eds and Mods with approval tools review the lyrics for new releases, make any necessary changes/corrections, and then “mark” a song page as approved, indicating that its lyrics are in good shape. (Sidenote: if you’re an Ed or Mod and that sounds like your thing, head over to this thread and request the tools!) Community staffers get alerted once a page has been marked as approved so we can review it and “staff approve” it. We can also directly staff approve lyrics that haven’t been reviewed by Eds and Mods yet.

Basically, using this process, staff approved lyrics = lyrics that have been intensively reviewed to ensure that they are complete and accurate. And that’s the ultimate goal of this whole lyric approval project: to make sure Genius lyrics are the best they can possibly be. But there’s one catch with the way things have been working up until now—“staff approved” lyrics could still be directly edited by anyone who had the privileges to normally edit the song, leaving room for inaccurate edits, or even worse…vandalism! 😱

To resolve this issue, we’re introducing a new “Lyrics Complete” feature on the song page. Starting today, when a community staffer approves a song, the lyrics will become “complete” and will enter a locked state similar to Verified lyrics. In other words, only staffers will be able to directly edit them, but everyone else will still be able to propose edits so you can check us if we messed something up! This change will also be retroactive, meaning all the songs we’ve already staff approved will be marked complete automatically.

The “Lyrics Complete” state will be visually represented in a couple ways on the song page. The most notable one is a banner message that will appear above the lyrics field when you click the “Edit Lyrics” button, telling you a) that the lyrics have been marked complete and b) who marked them complete:

The intention here is to add an extra layer of visibility so you know who to reach out to if your proposed edit is urgent or hasn’t been reviewed in a while. Community staffers will already get notifications when someone proposes an edit to a song they marked complete, and we’ll do our best to address all of them, but this way you can ping us if we miss yours.

You’ll also see this indicator in the gray info box below the Q&A section where the “Locked” indicator would normally go (just like the “Locked” indicator, you can hover to reveal more detailed info):

Let us know your questions/feedback! Our hope with the “marked as complete” feature is that we can prevent tampering and preserve all the effort @transcribers put into perfecting Genius lyrics. More transcription updates coming soon, so stay tuned!

this is dope! thumbs up to the team!

Sounds awesome. This feature came out better than I thought possible, really clean and streamline.

I was hoping this part of the process was going to come into effect soon! I also like the visibility of the “Lyrics Complete” in the stats section :)

Will editors/moderators who approved the lyrics first and brought them to staff’s attention be acknowledged in some way?

RIP to community staff’s inboxes

Thank you for this, and thank you for letting us propose lyrics; a lot of times what i’ll see is an old page that uses “ay or aye” instead of “ayy” or a page that uses improper capitalization. (Especially with ad-libs)

This is a wonderful addition to the site. Now all we need is cookies.

Nothing worse than doing a beautiful transcription just for some random dude with 100 IQ that just created his account three minutes ago to mess it all up.

This seems like a step in the right direction – great job :-)

I mean, this looks great and all, but I was using the check mark! :(
Sorry, couldn’t help it.

Will we get our language-specific community staffs back?
Otherwise this feature seems only really reasonable for the English-speaking part of the site.

Nevertheless I appreciate the idea in general! :)

If only staff is gonna be able to mess with proposals after a song is marked complete by staff, can we get the proposal notifications from those pages removed from regular users? Unless others see a reason to keep them. I get tons of them only to take the time to go to the page and see I can’t do anything anyways.

Cosign @killersnowtiger, I’m getting a lot of notifications about lyric proposals I can’t do anything about. Feel like we should restrict the notifications on lyric proposals to those who have the priveledges to accept/reject them.

I propose a big warning that flashes that says this has been approved by staff please think before you submit a suggestion

@killersnowtiger @ChloeConlon we talked about this when building the feature, and the thought was that staff is busy and gets a ton of notifications, so it’s good to make them visible to normal users so that they can bug staff more directly if there’s something that needs fixing

@Daktar we already have that!!! check the OP