Pioneers of the Inevitable, the company behind the open source Songbird music player, has had a tough year. Founding CEO Rob Lord left the company earlier this year after burning through $8 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Atlas Ventures. “We were left without a game plan,” said one person close to the company to me confidentially.
The company has struggled through, facing what all startups face when they run out of money – shut down or raise new money at unfavorable terms if they can get it. New CEO Jerrell Jimerson has managed to scrape together a new round of financing, we’ve confirmed. Atlas Ventures is participating, but Sequoia Capital has backed out. The new round also recapitalizes the company – it will wash out old investors and drop the valuation substantially. That means Lord, who remains a board member, will lose most of his equity in the company.
Songbird may have new legs, though. Another source tells us the company has a deal with Phillips to have Songbird included in 5 million Phillips music players. There’s a chance for Songbird to become a platform for Apple competitors to work from, much like Android provides Apple competitors an easy way to compete in the phone market.
Will it work? Investors seem to be interested enough to put more money behind the effort. And the company now, at least, has a game plan.
I hope it works out for them. I actually like the music player and iTunes need a viable competitor.
Another wash-out for entrepreneurs. They can’t all be big winners for all parties involved. Must be a helluva platform for the existing investor (Atlas) to continue to roll the dice forward.
“I am told that I am the songbird of my generation.”
~ Will ‘Brennan’ Ferrell
that was just too inviting.
I tried to like Songbird, I really did. I like its open source, cross platform nature. Some people have done interesting things with the extension system.
But they didn’t nail the basics first. They only recently got an equalizer, still no ripping or burning. Worst of all performance is bad, and terrible with a large library no matter how many times they say they’ve “improved it.” Searches still freeze the interface.
It’s just impossible to use or recommend in the face of better apps. They need to focus on the core player before they look to become a platform.
Spotify killed Songbird for me.
mashTape is an excellent plugin, you get blog results related to the track you’re playing so you can download the latest remixes directly to your library using the embedded browser.
I would love songbird gaining ground!
“Spotify killed Songbird for me.”
Pretty much the same for me. Only issue — and it’s a big one — is that Spotify cannot play my local 25+ GB music library. So i still have Songbird on my OS X box, and use it from time to time.
Meanwhile, on my Linux box, i use Quod Libet and love it. It doesn’t have many features but it has all the ones i want and a nice user interface. But on that same box, Spotify only runs through Wine, which causes some issues (saturated sound, freezes).
On Windows, i searched a while ago for a decent player (not iTunes), and found nothing that suited my tastes.
The three things preventing me from adopting Linux as the sole OS on my laptop are a lack of a well performing ms-exchange client, lack of feature compatibility with newer word/ppt documents, and lack of good software to manage my iPod Shuffle.
I do hope that Songbird lives on and fixes at least one of those problems for me.
Good for them for surviving Rob Lord. Anyone who has done business with him knows by now not to get involved with his projects.
iTunes rules your mother Songbird! Don’ even try and mess with Apple or you’ll get your face smooshed in dog doodoo!
@Anon. Actually, there is an asynchronous patch expected that will stop the interface freezing at least. Also, it currently only uses the firefox 3.0 Gecko. Gecko 3.5 is MUCH faster (and even supports JIT compiling for the interface). These two things will improve performance, and I’m sure once podcasting/video is added (which mostly completes the base), they will start working a LOT more on performance..
Just my opinion though. Adding the core features is the most important thing though (no point fixing performance when major features are missing)
was the Android plug really necessary?
@Andrew. I hope so. I want to love Songbird, I really do. We need a good cross-platform, open source media player.
The ‘whos playing locally’ plugin was a revelation. Amazing. I booked 3 concerts based on it.
It scanned the artists in my library and told me of upcoming concerts nearby. Did a better job of understanding ‘nearby’ than ticketmaster who suggests 400miles away.