Fred Destin

Well the Sonific Beta is just out courtesy of the well known music specialist Gerd Leonhard.  Concept is that you go to Sonific and choose fully cleared (legally speaking) songs that you can then embed nicely into your blog or your photostream so you can sonify the web.  No more silent pages with amazon wish lists , you can express your musical personality and tastes with long song samples.

Today this is very much beta so there is still work to do on the player etc. but it gives a good indication of what this could achieve over time.  The promise is to add interesting music to the web experience with inherent social filtering at the source (Digg style) and call to action on the e-commerce front.  I find this a very interesting complementary twist on the Pandora / Last.fm debate.   Here is an example of a "songspot":

I loo forward to seeing how this develops and adds to the online music equation.  I like the fact that it should be music industry friendly and a great way for content owners to market their content virally with conversion at the end through the e-commerce partners.  Being a VC I also have to ask the question of how this makes money ?  Without revealing too much the FAQ says the following:

So how does Sonific make money?

Among other things, Sonific will make money by offering targeted andstrictly contextual advertising (i.e. by offering ads that are relatedto the music that is being presented), and by collecting commissionsfrom e-commerce transactions that happen after people click on theSongSpots™ and buy the song, CD, concert ticket, music player orsubscription service.