…And then there are the music services you don’t have to pay me to talk about. I think this is a superb idea.
I introduced Gerd Leonhard to you the other day. He’s the music and media futurist and CEO of Sonific. And I think this is where he becomes most interesting: as the man behind one of the best online services I’ve yet come across for the marketing and distribution of music recordings.
There’s a small, but growing range of widget-based tools for music business out there. They’re quite a bit like embedded YouTube videos that you can put on any MySpace page, blog or website — but they’re tied into an e-commerce platform, and they let you listen to music.
More importantly, this is how to get your music onto the websites of thousands of your fans, so they can spread the word for you, and direct their friends straight to a cash register.
Personally, I think that of these sorts of services, Sonific’s currently the pick of the crop — and it ticks most of the 20 Things boxes too…
I spoke to Gerd about the Sonific widget, and how it can help you make money out of music online.
What is Sonific?
We are the leading provider of music applications and ‘widgets’ for social networks, blogs, and social media sites.
We support 42 platforms and have over 200.000 songs available for full-length use as embedded music players, called SongSpots. If you want to put music on your site or profile page, Sonific is the way to go.
What’s a SongSpot?
That’s what we call our embeddable music players. Essentially a copy & paste flash player like YouTube’s – works anywhere where html and embedded objects are allowed.
See: http://sonific.com/home/supported_sites
Is it a solution to a particular problem?
Yes. About 220 Million people are active on blogs and social networks, photo-sharing and other social media sites, and 90% of them want music with their pages or content they put up.
We solve this problem by making a universal music plug-in ‘widget’ available, for free, for any platform that wants to integrate it, as well as by cutting & pasting.
Why use embedded widgets?
It’s easy, instant and very flexible. The user can pick where he wants it, no downloads are required. Widgets are a major trend in distributed, syndicated media, and it will become a big part of every label’s distribution strategy, very soon.
So how do people submit their own music?
Anyone that owns their own music can submit at www.sonific.net. It’s free, and you can leave-anytime. No strings attached.
See http://sonific.net/agreement_artist for the contract.
Do you have to be signed to a record label?
No. Artists can go direct as well (but it does need be professional content!)
Can labels easily upload their entire roster of artists?
Yes. First via sonific.net, and then we can import on a large scale, too. That is done manually now — but we will have tools for doing that online soon as well.
Is there some sort of quality control?
Yes. We listen to everything, and our editors actually rate some tracks as well. Plus we will add user tagging and rating shortly. Having said that, we very rarely turn stuff down!
How does searching within the site work?
Right now, it’s very basic — but that will change soon.
The best way, right now, is to search by GENRE and then pick the featured artists first, or view the whole library. You can also use the search engine to search by artist name.
Do keep in mind that while we have many well-known artists and songs we do NOT YET have the top 100 chart hits etc – they are licensed by the major record labels, mostly, and we are still negotiating with them. So that’s a restriction that comes with being legal.
We do have ‘tribute’ bands and cover versions, though (try searching for ‘Madonna’, for example).
Also, we will offer Sonific SongSpots charts soon.
How’s the conversion rate from listeners to purchasers?
Depends very much on the song.
On average, almost 10% of our listeners click through to the ‘about this track’ page. After that, it varies wildly – but keep in mind that at this time most people don’t buy a lot of music online, anyway. Apart from iTunes, most offers just aren’t compelling enough yet (even though Emusic is one of my personal favorites).
This must be improved by the services (and again, by the major record labels), before it will start cranking.
Why did you make the choice to allow people to listen to whole songs?
That is a must-have for the user. 30 secs don’t work for anyone; and just having a shopping basket is not going to excite people, in my humble opinion.
Our feedback from our users has shown that this is absolutely crucial to the idea of offering music in this context.
It sounds like reasonably good quality — what’s the bit rate?
It’s variable but starts at 128k. also a crucial requirement…
Who’s already jumped on board?
Most of the large independents and their aggregators (on the content side), and 42 platforms that allow / offer our code.
The deepest partnerships are currently with WordPress, Typepad, Vox.com, Friendster, Blogger, Slideroll etc. – and another half a dozen will be announced shortly.
Do you actively seek out catalogue? Where are your biggest gaps?
We really would like to have more ‘head’ content but the LongTail also works nicely, so we are open for anything that is good. More Asian music would be nice, though.
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I’ll be talking about another widget service in the next few days, but in the meantime I’d love to hear what you think of Sonific. They’ve just added another 125,000 songs too. Let’s hear what you have to say in the comments.
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8 Comments
The “songspot” player would be even more interesting if it was based on playlists, not single songs. We searched for a versatile, good looking player for our band website planetakis.com and liked the embeddable imeem playlist player most. Imeem.com also offers nice single song and video players with a neat and clean design and detailed statistics for each item. Also Last.fm did a very good job on their player widget.
Thanks for making us aware of this. This is exactly the type of service, I’ve been looking for since the beginning of time.
I’m interested to know of the streaming royalty implications as this is full-track on demand listening. Do Sonific have to pay a royalty everytime someone listens to a track in full? How does that impact on the business, if only 10% are clicking through to ‘find out more’, let alone actually completing to checkout. Not criticising, just want to know more! thanks
This is a great idea, but….
By streaming a whole track I am not surprised there is only a 10% click through. If you like the song you can continue to listen to it at anytime via the widget.
I agree to a certain extent with regards to full track vs 30 second clip. I am sure users prefer this. If you asked people in the waiting in line at Starbucks if they would like to try a small chunk of a new muffin or take a whole one for free, what do you think they would say?
I realize that people aren’t buying a lot of music online. Thats not a reason to give up. We should make it easier for them.
The click through page seems to be more weighted towards promoting Sonific rather than the artist in question.
In order for the user to buy any music there is yet another click required to take you to Amazon (in the case of the songspot in the article).
I have great respect for Gerd Leonhard he has written a great deal of truth on the music industry.
I think an integrated way to pay for the music (as in the indiestore.com widget) is something that should be added.
The “music like water” may\should come but it isn’t here yet. I am not trying to put the genie back in the bottle here but its important that we send out the message that music HAS a monetary value.
I will read with interest your interview with another widget maker in this space.
Just to preempt any flaming. I am not a major record label employee or an employee of a competitor in this space. I am an indie music manager looking out for musicians and ensuring they are equitably paid for their work.
My company, SONGboost, developed a single-song player about a year ago. We call our song player a SONGshot. I won’t get into the technical merits of our product, or dwell on the fact that platform acceptance is a foregone conclusion for almost any widget developed in Flash. No, the only thing that really matters is your value proposition. Sonific’s value proposition when you get right down to it is – we give you technology (period). There are lots of small companies that offer free technology for playing music. If you are an artist, look for products and services that will invest money and time to get you noticed. We put our free products into the marketplace to serve as our virtual A&R department. When we see measurable activity and hear something we like, we make a non-exclusive offer to invest money into your song. Over the next six months, we are planning to dramatically expand both the technical and the promotional opportunities we offer artists. There is lots of room in the industry for healthy competition between companies offering services to artists. However, a widget is not a value proposition, but an offer to invest in your song certainly is.
I went and checked out SONGboost, found the blog, and read this very interesting post:
http://songboost.blogspot.com/2007/03/steak-tips-versus-candy-bars.html
Well, I thought it was very interesting, anyway. I just thought I’d see what others thought.
Admittedly I find most of my new music off other peoples myspace players now. but It’s a real turn off when players are all going off and clashing on bands pages though. I liked the idea of the bebo player – on myspace it’s just one song (tough choice) – bebo you can keep collecting and adding to your paylist.
Thanks for this discussion of Sonific.
David (above): this is TOTALLY apples and oranges. Sounds like comparing intellectual property with physical property… which is also a very ill-fitting comparison. Music has a money value precisely BECAUSE it is becoming ubiquitous not despite of it – it’s just that the value is no longer in the COPY but in ACCESS. Read http://www.muserati.com for my comments on this.
I also disagree on Bruce’s comment above: a music widget is very much a value proposition, on its own, as it affords free, viral ‘attention getting’ to artists and labels — and that always comes BEFORE asking for money, or before offering something to SELL. Sonific also provides a more value than just technology – after all, we have aggregated almost 200.000 tracks ;)
In a connected ecosystem, pre-viewing and ‘tasting’ via streaming media will be a crucial way of gaining fast traction for just about any kind of content. Yes, you can argue that nobody will buy a download if they can listen to a track on-demand over and over again, but that is like seeing people won’t go to a movie theatre if they can watch something on TV or use their VCRs to record it. Or people won’t buy books if they can xerox them. It’s simply about convenience, added value, and ease of use, period!
Finally, I wanted to share this update with you:
Sonific just launched the much reqiested playlist tools yesterday – now our users can use any of our 200.000 tracks to create fully interactive, full-length track playlists of up to 25 songs.
http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/07082007/250/sonific-com-launches-playlists-its-songspots-tm-music-widgets-users.html has more details.
Sonify the web!!!