How To Take Sonific From Good To Terrific

November 13th, 2006 Davis Posted in Music, Web 2.0 |

Over the last few months I’ve been playing around with the music site Sonific. The site has signed agreements with over 40,000 artists that allow people to listen and to share their catalog with their readers. Unlike the studio fat cats, Sonific understands that by allowing people to share quality music, it directly benefits the artists involved by selling more mp3s, concert tickets and increasing their brand band exposure.

As a fan of anyone who is willing to think outside the box, I’ve been impressed with Sonific’s flexibility and the catalog that they offer to their users. I do however, have a few suggestions that I think would improve the service.

First off, I’ve found that embeding their songs can be a bit obnoxious. In order to embed a song into a blog post, I must first publish the post and then give the specific location where the song will be published. This contrasts with the more blog friendly approach that YouTube takes, where they give you the embeded code up front, without requiring that you register or specify the destination. This is a small thing, but it’s still annoying to have to identify where I’m going to put a song before I actually put the song into a post.

My second complaint though is that the licensing of the songs doesn’t go far enough. It’s great that I can go to the site and listen to any of the songs on demand and that I can embed an original song into my website, but I still don’t have the authorization to use any of the songs in a podcast. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but without legal access to the music, it means that any podcast I do would just be boring chat instead of good independent rockin music. It would be great if Sonific could clear the digital music rights for me to incorporate their music into any podcast that I wanted to do.

While I understand that Sonific can’t just give me carte blanche access to incorporate their songs into any webcast, I think that they could create a program allowing podcasters to upload their programs directly to Sonific’s website and then use the songs in their podcast from there. These could either be clips of the songs that lead into interviews and show promos or they could be the whole song with a skip forward button that would allow listeners to skip past any songs they didn’t particularly care for.

If I had the ability to upload a podcast to Sonific, it would not only add to their content by creating a platform for independent podcasters to build on, but it would also give greater exposure to the artists who show up in the shows because it would mean that each song featured would likely get an endorsement, in addition to internet radio exposure.

By extending their digital agreements beyond just a single song and into a set of songs, Sonific could open up “traditional radio” programs to anyone who has the desire to sort through their 40,000 artist list and highlight songs that they enjoy. I’m not sure how they’d embrace downloading of the podcasts, but maybe they could create a program where users could pay a small fee if they wanted to download vs. stream a show.

While this wouldn’t allow me to add some of the more mainstream songs into my radio show, it would still give me a pretty big resource to pull music from and would make Davis Freeberg’s Midnight Hour one step closer to becoming a reality.