Sonific SongSpotting

Sonific is offline as of tonight (April 30 / May 1) - but we maybe back soon.

As announced and explained last week Sonific is going offline as you read this. This is indeed a sad day for all of us at Sonific, and for our many users, partners and content providers.

Note: if you have embedded a Sonific Songspot music widget on your blog or anywhere else you must now REMOVE IT (i.e. delete the code), otherwise your site visitors will get an error message or just a plain white nothingness-box.

We have received 100s of very supportive mails and encouraging comments from our users and there is quite a bit of blogosphere buzz about the reasons behind Sonific.com's voluntary shutdown (see my favorite snapshots below). One of the most astute comments is by Eliot van Buskirk at the WiredBlog.

If you are interested you can review Sonific's history via our delicious tags, Gerd Leonhard's Sonific-related blog posts, and of course... the wayback machine.

If you are (were) a Sonific user and you have not heard about this unfortunate development until now we apologize for any inconvenience caused, and for our widgets going dead on you. We hope that you can find a good alternative somewhere else; check out this list, or this Music2.0 directory, or (my favorites, even though there are not exactly the same), Project Playlist (freshly sued by the labels * no comment) and Last.fm.  New: a good Social Music Service Provider List is here

Please rest assured that we will not sell your email addresses to some spam outfit, or otherwise exploit your personal data that you have provided when you signed up.

Please note that, for now, Sonific.com and .net is down but the company is not - we are still in the process of evaluating a good many proposals and ideas to bring Sonific back, so... it's not totally over yet. One of the ideas we are investigating is to to return as a 100% user-generated site that allows musicians,  producers, bands, record labels or publishers to upload their music, and any of our users to rate, tag and use it (non-commercially, that is).

If you want to stay informed we recommend that you subscribe to this blog's feed and / or my personal mailing list (Gerd's News). If you want to get in touch with us, for whatever reason, please email me (Gerd Leonhard, CEO).

Anyway, for now, Sayonara, Auf Wiedersehen, Salut, Ciao... Over & Out.

Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder and CEO

PS: I do have another, even more fictional take on what the future may bring: Music will be SCARCE again. And so valuable. Read more here

from Lofter

And this is my Official Goodbye Video - in case you never got to try Sonific you can watch this:

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Sonific Goes Offline on May 1 2008

Sonific.com will go offline on May 1, 2008

A message by Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO

 

As a consequence of a the unworkable music licensing situation and the resulting lack of solid revenue modeling Sonific's founders and investors have decided to temporarily take Sonific.com and Sonific.net offline.  While we are looking for other ways to realize our vision we are also open to talking to any interested party that may have use for Sonific's user base, content relationships, technologies or distribution network (please contact us anytime to find out more). Together with some other partners, we may also investigate the concept of making Sonific a paid-for service that is provided to artists, record labels and other content providers on a white-label basis.

Here are some background details on our decision:

1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them 'free' company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry's major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.

2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content  b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available - permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep. 

Unfortunately we don't like any of these choices. 

The bottom line is that this industry is certifiably dysfunctional and that we do not see a plausible path to take at this time. We neither want to engage in so-called copyright infringement nor do we have millions of dollars available to buy our way in when it is abundantly clear that doing business under the existing rules of the major labels will simply amount to economic suicide.

Almost a billion people now use music to stream on their blogs, social network pages, home-pages and user profiles – this is indeed a veritable gold mine for music marketing and selling, and it can make serious money for artists and composers. Yet, the established players in the music industry are still looking to simply squeeze 'permission fees' from companies that want to serve this market, instead of building new opportunities together.  Maybe, just like Radio over 100 years ago, a plausible conclusion may just be that this must apparently be done without permission while the industry catches up - but we shall leave this for others to explore this theme.

We want to thank all our partners and the many artists, independent record labels as well as the few major label new media people that dared to try us anyway, and the leading music aggregators that have provided the over 200.000 songs that Sonific has offered until now. We also want to thank our faithful users that played our music every day, and the over 80.000 people hat have signed up for our service, and we apologize for having to pull the plug on you. We hope to return in a different incarnation; please stay tuned via our blog.

Gerd Leonhard

Co-Founder & CEO

Update: if you are looking for alternatives to Sonific, try this list

A few more things:

FOR OUR USERS

• If you want to comment on this announcement please email us go the Sonific Blog
• If you are a Sonific user, please note that you need to remove the widget code from your sites and blog posts asap otherwise there will be empty spots on your pages when we turn the streaming off on May 1, 2008 
  
• If you want to keep on playing music on your website, here (below) are a few great resources you can go to and pick whatever works for you (please note that we don't make any representations on the legal status of any of the offerings listed here):

1049 Facebook Music Apps

Mashable List of Music2.0 providers

FOR OUR SONIFIC.NET MUSIC PROVIDERS

If you have provided your own music to Sonific.net we very much apologize for the trouble but we cannot continue to provide this service for you.

Please take a look at this list to see if they can offer similar services.

Reverbnation

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Sonific Music Widget launches on Facebook!

We are thrilled to announce that Sonific's Music Application for Facebook has finally gone live today. If you are a Facebook user, just go here and start adding music to your profile; it's basically instant. We are delighted (and exhausted) to have this first version of our MusicAPI up-and-running, - any feedback you may have would be appreciated.

 

My Facebook profile is here, btw - if you want to connect, just ping me and be sure to mention my blog so that I can 'befriend' you quickly.  Sonific, which I have been fronting as CEO for the past 2 years, has over 200.000 really cool tracks available on this app, and they are all fully licensed, too ;). If you are searching for top 100 / chart tracks, though, you will not find a lot of them here, for now - most of the major labels have not graced us with their permission yet (but please don't get me started on that...).  Having said that, there are some really great exceptions, though, mostly from the UK  - check out the "Made in the UK' playlist in your default playlist folders, once you've added the app.

 

I will be publishing playlists with some of my favorite tracks on my Facebook profile, regularly, so keep on checking.  Note that if you are a musician or a label, you can also add your music to Sonific, (and thereby to Facebook, too) by just going to Sonific.net and uploading your own stuff - it's pretty much instant and free (naturally).

Sonific.com launches Playlists for its SongSpots™ Music Widgets: users can now create, embed and share playlists with up to 25 full-length-music streams

This is big news for us... and you saw it here first. Playlists tools are now live at Sonific.com - no more one-track SongSpots!  Here is the press release that is going out tomorrow.

San Francisco, CA, August 7, 2007

Sonific LLC, a leading provider of music widgets for social media sites, today announced the availability of playlists for its SongSpots™ music widgets. Following today’s release, a www.Sonific.com user can build and share fully customizable playlists with up to 25 full-length tracks containing any of the over 200.000 songs provided by Sonific, on-demand and in any order, without any restrictions, free of charge.

Sonific's SongSpots™ music widgets can simply be copied and pasted into personal web spaces on over 40 platforms and many Web2.0 applications, including iGoogle, Myspace, eBay, Facebook, Friendster, Yahoo360, Blogger, Xanga, Vox, Wordpress, Typepad, Netvibes, LiveJournal, AIM Pages, Smugmug, FreeWebs, Multiply, Slideroll, Windows Live, and Ning, instantly adding a fully personalized music experience to web-sites, user profiles and online communities.

Unlike most online radio services that are operating based on compulsory web-casting licensing schemes that govern the blanket use of master recordings, Sonific licenses all recordings directly from each participating artist or record label. Therefore, Sonific's service is not hampered by the often quite stringent licensing restrictions that prohibit some of the most user-appreciated features such as fully interactive playlists and the on-demand play of individual songs.

Comments Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder and CEO of Sonific: "Many people enjoy listening to user-influenced or socially-programmed web radio services such as Pandora and Last.fm. On the other end of the spectrum, we have found that most people that are active social media participants or UGC creators and that seek to customize or 'widgetize' their own web-sites and online spaces by adding music, definitely want to select every single song they present to their visitors. The selected songs directly and immediately reflect who they are, as individuals, and are therefore a crucial part of their self-presentation. Since we launched 10 months ago, 1000s of users have asked us for this feature, and we are delighted to be able to offer it starting today. With this launch, and together with the recent launch of the Sonific Music Network at www.sonific.net, the possibilities for using SongSpots™ music widgets have become even more powerful: bands, artists and record labels can upload their own music at www.Sonific.net, create a complete radio-like music program using their tracks, and spread it virally across the web as a SongSpot™. Or, any user can now become a virtual DJ and share his individual playlists with his friends, on any platform he chooses. For the music industry, free, viral music syndication tools are now clearly becoming the driving force behind what I like to call Music2.0 - the next generation of how music is being marketed and sold. And Sonific intends to lead the way."

Sonific's catalog features a huge catalog of 'Longtail' music in just about any genre, provided by over 45.000 record labels and artists, as well as songs by well-known artists such as Frank Sinatra, Muddy Waters, The Barenaked Ladies, Coldcut, Billy Bragg, Echo & the Bunnymen, Scratch Lee Perry, Daddy Yankee and Amon Tobin.

And here is an example:

Sonific will launch Playlists for SongSpots within the next few days - fully interactive custom radio programs with any of our songs!

Finally!  You have asked for it, we listened, we built it. Sometime in the next few days we will be launching the beta version of our new SongSpots Playlists tool!!  Now you can select a large number of tracks from our catalog of over 200.000 songs, make a playlist of full-length tracks, and publish them as a SongSpot Music Widget. No longer just one track. No restrictions. No short cuts. No charge. 43 platforms that support it... Stay tuned for the launch announcement.

*Note: while all SongSpots will be able to play playlists it will be a few more weeks before you will be able to navigate within the player itself, i.e. to skip tracks etc. Right now all tracks will simply play in succession as we still need to test the nav tools.  Thanks for your patience.