*By Carlo Versano*
Genius, the online encyclopedia for lyrics, has struck a deal with Apple that will allow Apple Music subscribers to listen to a song and follow its lyrics side-by-side, all from the Genius website.
"This is a really big moment for Genius ー and for Apple too, I think," Genius chief strategist Ben Gross said Friday in an interview on Cheddar. He called the integration a "dream experience" for music lovers and a "pure value add" for Apple Music users.
For Apple Music, the partnership exposes the service to a new user base.
Gross cited Comscore data to show that three-quarters of users who log on to Genius don't already pay for a streaming service.
The deal is the latest example of how Apple ($AAPL) has made a priority of its music platform ー along with other services that guarantee revenue from monthly subscriptions. Services ー which include Apple Music, the App Store, and iCloud ー generated $9.55 billion in sales in its latest quarter, up more than 30 percent from the year before and nearly 20 percent of total revenue.
The company's partnership with the iPhone maker could also create new revenue stream for songwriters and artists. While Gross praised the "Music Modernization Act," signed by President Trump on Thursday at the White House, where he was flanked by Kid Rock and Kanye West, headline performers are only one part of the creative music complex.
Monetization for songwriters, even if they aren't performers, is equally important, Gross said. So, like Apple Music, Spotify ($SPOT), and other music platforms, Genius ー which has over 100 million unique visitors a month on its website and native apps, plus growing audiences on social, according to Gross ー has deals to pay out artists whose lyrics are read on its service.
"When we make money, the songwriters and artists who create the content that we're trying to do cool things with also make money," Gross said.
Genius is replacing a patchwork online database of lyrics that has "been sort of garbage."
"Lyrics are an incredibly important part of music culture," Gross said.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/apple-music-gets-wiser-with-music-encyclopedia-genius).
Stocks closed lower on the last trading day of 2021, but all three major indexes ended the year with double-digit growth. The S&P 500, in particular, marked its third straight positive year. What's in store for 2022 amid the Federal Reserve's plans to speed up asset tapering and raise interest rates, and how could COVID-19 continue to impact stocks? Steve Sosnick, Chief Strategist at Interactive Brokers, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss movement on the last trading day of 2021, market predictions for 2022, and more.
As the pandemic continues to evolve, and cases of the omicron variant increase, how will this impact economic growth and movement in the new year? Consumer behavior continues to shift, labor issues linger, and questions about whether the pandemic will eventually become endemic are on economists' minds as we enter 2022. Jason Ware, Economist & Chief Investment Officer at Albion Financial Group, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Mike Draper, Founder and Owner of Raygun, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses how increases to the minimum wage in several states next year will help his company and explains why he advocates for it nationally.
The push to regulate the gig worker economy is gaining steam as the share of workers who participate in freelancing through businesses like Uber and Lyft have also exponentially grown during the pandemic. Employment attorney Mark Kluger, founding partner at Kluger Healey, LLC, joined Cheddar to break down how the battle to reclassify gig workers will continue in the new year, and why the issue continues to generate conflict. "More and more workers are using gig work as their primary source of income and as a result of that they are not like employees in the sense that they don't have benefits like health insurance," Kluger noted.
Renewable energy company Heliogen has gone public via a SPAC merger with blank check company Athena Technology Acquisition Corp. on the NYSE. Joining Cheddar, founder and CEO Bill Gross went into why he felt the end of 2021 was the best time to get into the public markets. "If you think of the Industrial Revolution and the digital revolution, this renewable revolution is probably going to be as big or larger than that," he said. "So we're going to use this capital to scale our business, to meet more customer demand, to do more projects in parallel, and to scale our research and development to continue to drive down the price to be competitive with fossil fuels."
Carl "The Moon" Runefelt, a Bitcoin investment expert, recently made a hefty purchase of a $2 million Bugatti sports car at a Dubai dealership. The Swedish crypto evangelist joined Cheddar to talk about how he made the big acquisition of a luxury item he had long had his eye on and why he chose the dealership, The Car Vault, to make the unprecedented transaction. "They accepted crypto directly, and that was important to me," he said. "I am not going to go to any car dealership that don't accept crypto, and that's kind of a principle I have today."
