The Day the Music Died

I’m very sad to share with you that Sonific.com goes offline on May 1, 2008. Until I can find another suitable music streamer, that will be the day the music dies here at the loft.

Excerpts from 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.
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.
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 hope to return in a different incarnation; please stay tuned via our blog.

Gerd Leonhard
Co-Founder & CEO

To read the entire letter, click here. On a personal note, I want to thank Sonific (and you, Gerd) for the great music you’ve provided, as well as for introducing me to new artists through your service. Great artists like Erika Luckett, who I’d never heard until Sonifici. I’d think that would be worth something to the companies who are producing the music… but apparently, not enough. Sad, but true. I’ll miss the tunes.
On a happier note, today Life at the Foot of the Stairs saw it’s 5,000th visitor! That may not sound like much to some, but for an old, fat man working alone, that’s pretty darn good! Thanks to everyone for taking to time to drop by, and even more thanks to those who actually take that extra minute to comment!

“Oh, and while the king was looking down,
The jester stole his thorny crown.
The courtroom was adjourned;
No verdict was returned.
And while Lennon read a book of Marx,
The quartet practiced in the park,
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died.”
- Don McLean, from the song “American Pie”