Snocap Drops 60% Of Staff And On The Market: Looking Good For The Deadpool
Duncan Riley
19 comments »
B2B digital music distributor company Snocap, the spawn of Napster founder Shawn Fanning, looks like its warming up for a Deadpool entry with confirmation by CNet that the company has let go of 60% of its staff and is on the market.
Snocap has apparently “received interest from several companies” as is pursing these for an asset sale.
Snocap was founded in 2002 and has amongst its investors Ron Conway, Morgenthaler Ventures and WaldenVC. The company allows rights owners to place music onto p2p networks and retail sites with DRM, aiming to leverage P2P networks for distribution whilst still charging for music.
Snocap’s last big deal was to provide music sales for MySpace in September 2006 and we wrote about Shawn Fanning’s plans in December 2006 to start a World of Warcraft focused social network called Rapture. According to Snocap’s website the MySpace deal is still in place, which presuming it is transferable to a new owner would provide some value in the Snocap fire sale.
Snocap is now on TechCrunch Deadpool watch.
I never liked these people or any of you B2B users, stealing music and God knows what else!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I know plenty of people who are selling their music with SnoCap but I don’t know of a single one who has sold any songs. It seems like this service was made to be bought from the moment that it launched. Let’s all speculate that Facebook will buy SnoCap to spark its music service.
if layoffs are a way to the deadpool you missed out on claria/gator. down from about 200 to….40? big round in april, bigger round a few weeks back.
It’s no wonder they are floundering. I tried to put an artists on Snocap to use the Snocap store on MySpace for weeks. They should test their own signup process. I could not get customer service to reply after trying five times. The empty store sat on the artist’s MySpace page for over a month. Nothing was seamless and the process was frustrating. The Snocap experience was one of the reasons I pulled the artist (www.myspace.com/jediahband) from mySpace (another business in decline)..
We believe artists should do both - give away and sell digital music. The people that hunt for free music are not the same people that opt for the convenience and uniformity of iTunes. Unsprung artists should make their music available on every platform on earth - free, paid, illegal, legal, etc..
I am waiting for one of these stores to take the premium road: highest price, highest quality (coupled with education on this USP), best images, newest releases, highest return to the artist, etc, etc.. That would be a positioning and segmenting lesson..
Rob,
They have a deal with MySpace. I am pretty sure that the deal prevents them from entertaining competitive offers before informing MySpace of the same.
We were going to work with Snocap back when it was intended to be a “legit” p2p service provider, but found it didn’t meet our needs. It seems that they then went in an entirely different direction as they realized legit p2p services were just doing it themselves - cheaper and more effectively.
The new middle-man model is not necessarily a bad idea - but I think they are encountering the same problem as before - if an artist wants to sell music online, they are either going to use a full service platform like iTunes or rVibe, or they are going to go it alone (ie: put up their own store).
And as is always the case, if it’s not easy to use, if it doesn’t work and it doesn’t add value - it just doesn’t fly.
@ Rob Blatt - I’m not sure they were built to buy - but like PeerImpact - as a distribution technology - they might be in that position now. However, since it’s a p2p distribution application, I can’t really see Facebook buying them. Maybe MS…
***
http://www.rvibe.com
You mean it’s “cooling down for a deadpool entry…”
Too much of crap from fake steve ballmer.
mmmmmmm SnoCaps
does it still go in the deadpool if someone buys them. just for fun
How many people is 60%?
I’d like to know how many 60% is as well?
Thirty one people were let go.
Perhaps an analogy can be made with the polar IceCaps…
Maybe artists/promoters will start looking at BlastMyMusic.com since it will function on multiple sites (ie. myspace, facebook and the artist own site), plus it has better customer service.
http://www.blastmymusic.com
You don’t need more than2 people to run something as simple as Snocap. Unless they’re developers, and they obviously weren’t doing much development.
I’m sure the developers won’t have to look far for new gigs