Sonific

Posted by Robin | Filed under Cool Sites

I found this on my New Music Strategies feed, which i think is fun. please check out Dubber’s interview with Sonific’s CEO Gerd Leonhard.

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.