sonific
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Sonific was a San Francisco music startup founded in July 2005 by Gerd Leonhard. Its SongSpots service offered customizable, Flash-based music widgets that let anyone embed full-length streaming tracks from the Sonific catalog on blogs, social network pages and slideshows, as free promotional plays under a hear it, like it, buy it model. By early 2008 it had licensed over 200,000 tracks and counted 80,000 users.
02 / sonific FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Sonific could not negotiate licenses with the major record labels, and the site was closed at the end of April 2008. Founder Gerd Leonhard described the music industry as dysfunctional for licensing: the companies that had secured major-label deals, such as SpiralFrog, imeem and Last.fm, had paid large advances and accepted unrealistic usage rates and restrictions. A startup that could not clear that licensing bar had no catalog to run its widget business on.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Gerd Leonhard founds Sonific in San Francisco to make large music catalogs usable on the internet for private and professional uses.
- Product launch
Sonific releases SongSpots, its B2C music widget service for embedding full-length tracks on web pages.
- Operations ended
After failing to secure major-label licenses, Sonific closes at the end of April 2008.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Embeddable music widgets for blogs and social pages
- 02
200K+ licensed tracks, 80K users by early 2008
- 03
Could not clear major-label licensing
- 04
Closed end of April 2008