Sonific, an online music playing servuce similar to Pandora and Seeqpod, is to close May 1 as the company was unable to obtain licensed music rights in a way that made the service viable.

Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO writes:

1) 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.

2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available - permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep.

Unfortunately we don’t like any of these choices.

Sonific joins the TechCrunch Deadpool

thanks to Andrew Watson for the tip

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MyPlayList, a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France, combines streamed music and Flickr for a free music service that delivers visual as well as musical abundance.

MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music to avoid any copyright issues.

To use, users enter the name of any band or singer, and the system automatically compiles a Flickr - music combination, or suggests an existing playlist if one is already in the system. Registered users can create custom playlists and the site offers various embedable versions as well.

We covered GrooveShark’s new player yesterday, and MyPlayList works in the same space (along with Seeqpod). The visuals delivered by MyPlayList is a nice touch, particularly in full screen mode. Mark the site down as another free music provider that may challenge the likes of the play five times then buy Last.fm and the geo-retarded Pandora.

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Music sharing and sales startup Grooveshark has launched Grooveshark Lite, a flash app that provides access to all the songs in Grooveshark’s library.

For those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest goes to the record companies, and the service is 100% legal).

The new Grooveshark Lite player is not dissimilar to what Last.fm offers, but without the silly restrictions like being able only play the single five times. It also helps that Grooveshark has a huge selection of music; I don’t have comparable numbers but Grooveshark returned better results on a couple of more obscure searches, where as Last.fm failed or only had 30 seconds of the song. Unlike Seeqpod, another service that allows you to search for and play music uninhibited (and until now my music service of choice), the music on Grooveshark is of a more reliable quality as it’s vetted for sale, although unlike Seeqpod you cant illegally download the track, if that’s how you like getting your music.

The player offers music by artist, album and song title, and is free to use and doesn’t require registration, although registration is required to use Grooveshark services such as playlists and sharing.

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San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike launched a “news feed” for favorite artists this week. Users can now see exactly what their favorite artists are up to - when they go on tour, release new songs or videos, etc, the news is presented to them in the feed.

Users can select their favorite artist via the iLike website or on their social network applications. Or the service decides what you like based on your playing habits on iTunes (they have an iTunes plugin - if you listen to a song ten times, it thinks you like the artist).

The news feed for favorite artists can be viewed via the iTunes plugin, the website, the social network applications, or via a new iPhone app (just go to iLike on an iPhone and log in).

The company continues to dominate the Facebook music scene. Their U2 page on Facebook has 1.9 million fans. Compare that to just 168,000 friends on the MySpace U2 page, and 933,000 on Last.fm. The fact that a previously unreleased U2 song was first heard on iLike didn’t hurt those numbers, either.

In July 2007 iLike had 4.5 million users of its Facebook application. Today they have 14 million. But more than half of their new members today are coming from their iLike.com site and other social networks - OpenSocial gave them access to Bebo, Hi5 and soon MySpace. On their website alone they see 3.5 million worldwide monthly visitors, which isn’t bad considering most users interact with iLike via their iTunes plugin, or on Facebook and other social networks. Last.fm, which was acquired last year for $280 million, has 4.7 million.

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SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls.

While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage.

The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM.

However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well.

HypeMachine

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Deezer

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Imeem

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It is good to see some creative licensing finally taking hold in the music industry. Today, CBS-owned Last.fm announced that you can now stream the full track of any song up to three times for free, in addition to its regular music-discovery service which streams related songs you might like in a random order. This is also the first step towards a future subscription service, which will allow an unlimited number of plays. After the third time you listen to a song, listeners will see a promotion for the upcoming service.

Last.fm has signed deals with all four major record labels and most independents to stream their tracks in the U.S., UK, and Germany, with other countries coming soon. Instead of paying one-time fees per song that don’t make economic sense on the Web, artists and music labels will receive ongoing royalties based on how many times each song is listened to. The details of how much Last.fm is paying per song were not revealed, but moving towards a pay-for-performance model is good for both online music services and the music industry.

Music needs to be sampled before most people want to buy it. The current Web industry norm of the 30-second clip just won’t cut it anymore. Perhaps Last.fm will help to set a new precedent here with limited full-track streams. It might be difficult for iTunes or Amazon to abandon the 30-second preview, however, because neither one has an ongoing revenue stream from advertising or subscriptions with which to pay an ongoing royalty. At least, not yet.

Also see MOG’s recent integration of full-length tracks from Rhapsody.

Last.fm

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Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta.

Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keeping its crosshairs focused on the U.S. market and its dominant revenue potential.

MeeMix’s public beta launch is marked by the addition of new features:

• Meeps: Comment-based conversations users can have regarding a song, album or artist.
• Station Home: Every MeeMix station now has a dedicated page allowing users to interact in its context and shape its playlist.
• Mee Feeds: This is basically MeeMix’s version of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indicates songs favorited, stations rated, friends added, etc.
• Mee Journey: Users can see other members’ public log or “journey” of actions in MeeMix.
• Station Gift: Users can now send other members a station as a gift. The station is then the “property” of the recipient who can customize it without affecting the original station.
• Twitter Integration: Users can update their Twitter accounts with songs they’ve listened to, their favorite stations, etc.

MeeMix claims to have doubled its music catalog, but a search for my personal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up positive.

I would like to have seen the addition of “genre” to the channel creation wizard which is still limited to artist and song. A widgetized player also would have been a welcome addition, especially the desktop kind.

In my original post, I hypothesized that licensing its engine could become MeeMix’s core business. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the company says they have been approached by a mobile operator for the purpose of powering a taste-based cellular music streaming service. The company has also shared with me some interesting offline deals on the horizon that should keep MeeMix’s potential on a positive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the meantime, let us know how you think MeeMix compares to the competition.

Update: MeeMix also sent out an email to some users today saying that they will be discontinuing the service in Israel for now due to licensing issues (Thanks Orli):

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We first wrote about Wakoopa when they launched in April. It’s a downloadable program for application addicts that tracks the software or games you use. We called it a Last.fm for applications, alluding to the program’s tracking and recommendation system similar to audio scrobbling.

While there are obvious privacy concerns (addressed here), over 17,000 people have signed up for the service (no word on downloads). The site draws half a million people each month to profiles for over 70,000 applications they track on Mac, PC and even the iPhone. To date, they’ve tracked about 110 million hours of software usage. Firefox is the top ranked app, with over half a million hours of use.

All this usage has generated some pretty interesting data that Wakoopa is now exposing through new Alexa-like graphs. Although Wakoopa will be officially launching the graphing feature tomorrow, TechCrunch readers can get access now by just adding “?techcrunch=true” to any URL(example). Like Alexa, the graphs show the relative rank and reach (% usage) of an application amongst their sample population. By first quarter next year, they’ll allow comparisons of up to 5 applications and embedding.

Granted, the sample population is pretty geeky. The current data reveals some kind of alternate universe where Firefox’s superior browser has finally usurped Explorer’s majority market share (see below). Yet even though it may be biased, the data gives a previously unseen look at highly valuable information about how we use our computers. For instance, Wakoopa has found Tuesday is the day users play games the least. They also found women spend twice as much time in Photoshop than men.

The team’s moving from Amsterdam to the valley next year, and I look forward to seeing what else they have planned for the product.

Wakoopa

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Social music recommendation service MyStrands has completed the second half of their B round, raising an additional $24 million from Spanish Bank BBVA on top of the $25 million we reported earlier.

BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. This brings total financing for the Corvallis, OR based startup to $55 million, significantly more than $5 million raised by London-based Last.fm which started around the same time (later sold for $280 million).

MyStands core products are a music recommendation engine for discovering songs you love while on your computer, mobile, and even playing them in bars you frequent. They recently launched a music video product that puts a more pleasant face on YouTube’s music video archives. They’ve made over $12 million in sales from these products during 2007.

Even with revenues pacing nicely, $24 million is a lot of capital and its not clear they really need it. The company says the money will go towards expanding their recommendation engine beyond music, although they’re not saying how quite yet. The most MyStrand’s VP of Communications Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria will say is that “…the general idea is to keep building technologies that will help people discover different products and services.”

Well, now they have quite a war chest to pursue that goal.

MyStrands

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Slacker

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I have a special place in my heart for music streaming site Pandora. It was one of the first startups profiled on TechCrunch, back in the summer of 2005.

Pandora creates radio stations for users based on input on the songs they like and don’t like. Over time it learns about what you like and tends to play exactly what you are looking for. But it also plays new music that it thinks you will like - I’ve discovered a few new bands from listening to the service. It is usually playing in the background when I blog. In short, I think Pandora is just about perfect in its current form.

I imagine, though, that Pandora has a long term goal of achieving a liquidity event on par with Last.fm’s $280 million sale to CBS earlier this year. And to do that, they seem to think that they need to be a lot more like that service.

Pandora is releasing a batch of new features tonight under the name “Pandora Extras.” They are saying “listening is just the start” (Frankly, I think it’s just enough). The new features are starting to make the service look more and more like Last.fm. They include:

• make friends with other Pandora users (it’s a social network!)
• recommendations of new artists and songs based on what you are hearing
• points you to other Pandora listeners who have similar tastes
• 100 new “finely tuned genre stations”

Two of the new features are clearly designed to make Pandora more like Last.fm (recommendations based on what others are listening to, and creating a social network). The second bullet above is a way to branch out from a given radio station, and I like it. I’m indifferent to the new pre-made radio stations.

As long as Pandora doesn’t screw up the core listening experience, I’m with them. But if they dilute that experience because they feel they need to follow the current trend of turning everything into a social network, I will be the first to bail on them.

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