Sonific goes offline – Music industry still not seeing big picture
Sonific today announced that it was going offline, which is yet another online music venture that has been forced to shut by the unfair demands of the music industry. Isn’t it time the big players started seeing the bigger picture?
Sonific was/is a streaming music widget which enabled users to embed free music on their websites, blogs and social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook, profiles. It was also a company which decided to go the legal route, and try to succeed through partnerships with record labels.
Unfortunately, while independent labels signed up and licensed their music for use through the site, it seems the demands of the major record labels made the scenario unworkable.
Sonific CEO Gerd Leonhard, who is also a music, and new media futurist, announced the closure of the business as of May 1st in a post on the website, and he put the blame squarely at the door of the record labels.
He claims that when the company approached the big record labels for licensing deals to stream their music, it was asked 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.”
And without co-operation from at least one of the big four labels, Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner, the venture just wasn’t worth the trouble, and was never going to make any money.
Leonhard then sums up his frustrations with the way the music industry continues to behave towards anyone trying to provide a legitimate online music streaming service by saying:
“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.”
It does indeed seem potty that when faced with a legitimate company which is trying to be fair to both the artists, and the consumers, and is doing everything by the book, the big players in the music industry still just see dollar signs, and short term gain.
But by making it impossible for a small company such as Sonific to operate, and make any sort of profit, it is going to force people to look elsewhere for music on the Internet. The chances are, that elsewhere will be by illegal means, and the only losers in the end are the record labels, and artists, who then see nothing for their work.
Sonific may have just been a small fish in a very big pond, but it shutting down is further proof that the music industry needs to evolve or die. At the moment, they are committing commercial suicide.
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