Sonific Songspots, which is currently in invite-only beta, is a new widget for putting music on MySpace, blogs and other social sites. The company was founded in 2005 by Gerd Leonhard, author of "The Future of Music", and Gunnar Östergren, a technology strategist and startup veteran. Sonific is privately funded by "well-known" US angel investors.
The idea is so simple that it doesn't need much explanation: the team is licensing as much music as possible and providing a player to add to your website. Flash and javascript widgets are both available, and they create custom code for users on Blogger, hi5, MovableType, MySpace, Piczo, TypePad or Xanga. Once you've chosen a track, it appears in the "My Songspots" section of the site. However, the widget only plays one track, which seems limiting. It's also worth noting that there are already plenty of tools for adding your own MP3s to MySpace, even if that's not strictly legal. What's more, these widgets play multiple tracks - unlike the default MySpace music player, which is limited to one.
But by far the biggest hurdle is the size of the song library. Since it's early days, there are only a handful of tracks in the database, most of them from relatively unknown independent artists. Sonific are working hard to get more tracks licensed, and in the end it's the size of the music library that will make or break them - getting some major artists in there would be a big boon.
See also Snocap's MySpace music player, the latest venture from Napster founder Shawn Fanning.
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