Sonific provides a music player and access to music, thus allowing you to place music on your web site. It’s one of the ways in which you can put music on a blog hosted at WordPress.com, as this one is.
The above will cease to be true on May 1, when Sonific will go offline. A message by Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO explains why.
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.
In other words, Sonific cannot provide a wide enough selection of music to compete without risking legal action or losing money. I don’t expect Sonific to come back online.
I’m sorry to see Sonific go, having used it a few times at this very blog, starting in July last year. There are still multiple ways to get music on a WordPress.com blog.
I saw the news of Sonific going offline on the WordPress.com forums. I expect that there will be discussion of any replacement in the same topic.
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