I wasn’t going to post much about the commercialisation of ambisonia.com, but I’ve found a talk presented by the founder of imeem.com, now dead, which highlights many of the reasons why music websites are so difficult.

Have a listen, its 27 minutes long.

Whilst I didn’t express (on the blog) many of the commercial options I explored, I did do quite a few fully spreadsheeted scenarios. Some were based on payed downloads, some were based on the ‘artists-tools’ service model, the last one I tried was more of a ‘publishing platform’ for recording engineers model, others were based on licensing scenarios.

I still think about what models might work, and there are still some ideas that I think are worth trying. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from doing ambisonia.com … it is that doing music on the internet is incredibly difficult.

At the end of that video, the speaker expresses:

with music start-ups, the only way to win is to not play

In question time, someone asks if creating a label is not the best way to monetise music on websites. The presenter’s answer is yes, but then labels require a whole different skill set to web startups.

The most likely scenario for soundOfSpace.com is that it becomes a label. But I need to partner with someone who has ‘music label’ skills.