Songbird, the San Francisco start-up that has made a smart music player that searches and plays music on your desktop and on the Web, has raised about $1 million from Atlas Ventures and big name venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital.
It will soon unveil its second release, which has some cool new features. Songbird originally played only on windows, but the coming version will play on other operating systems, including Mac OS and Linux. It began testing the cross-platform release last week, and the new version will be ready over the next week or two.
Check out the screencast below (it is fun, especially the end), to see Songbird’s playing features. Songbird, as you’ll recall, is also browser, where you can browse web sites and find music to play. Songbird searches a site you visit for audio and other files, and displays them neatly at the bottom of the player. You can then click and drag them to your own media library, on your desktop. You can play them any time, and jump to any point in the song.
If you like a song or band, you can use a Web search bar to select from a number of music search engines, such as Scissorkick to find songs from the bands you like. Songbird also lets you subscribe to a music blog, and updates your player with the files as they come in, along with meta data telling you the name of the band, and so on. It can also play video files. Finally, it provides “skins,” or what it calls feathers.
The company’s name is officially Pioneers of the Inevitable. The money will be used as a “bridge” for the company, until it raises a first venture capital round, according to a credible source.
3 Comments
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Trevor said:
It’s not just about the business model, the elephant is the pace of development…they were featured in techcrunch in November of 2005. That’s 10 months to go from .1 to .2. The program is still terrifically promising — and terrifically bug-laden. They should have skipped the cross-platform approach and focused on a PC version (and this is coming from a Mac user desperate for an iTunes alt.) and should spend more time developing and less time drawing pictures of their mascot.
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Jonathan said:
Fair complaint Trevor, don’t penalize them for having a great graphic artist on staff. :) They sit on the line between the software business and the media business, where a great brand can mean as much as great technology.
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Fred D said:
Alex please not Atlas Venture is actually Boston and Europe not West Coast. There should be an exciting mobile angle to this space, so Europe matters a lot. As Musiwave has proven the Euro carriers have been more agressively experimental with music.
11 Trackbacks
9:06 pm
SongBird gets financed - alexmoskalyukblog said:
[...] VentureBeat is reporting on Songbird’s $1 mln bridge financing by some heavy weights off Sand Hill Rd, Sequoia included. SongBird is certainly an interesting application, and Pioneers of the Inevitable, its parent company, is even more interesting. They spoke at Yahoo! a while ago, and while the presentation included the demo of the player, and reasons why you would want to use their music player, you couldn’t ignore the large elephant in the room - the question of the business model. [...]
8:19 am
» U$S 1 Millón para Songbird » Linux Platense said:
[...] ArtÃculo completo en Venture Beat. [...]
9:19 am
Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Amie Street Takes Innovative Music Model Into Beta said:
[...] Today marks Amie Street’s official public launch as well as a site redesign. The design is still a bit rough, but some new features have been added and there is better Mac support for the interface. The new site allows advanced searching, a pop-up music player allowing users to listen to playlists of sample tracks, and Meebome accounts for real-time-chat in artist stores. Since we covered the company in July, their user base has increased to around 4,000 users. They have had a couple hundred artists participating in the alpha selling around 2,100 songs. The band State Radio from Nettwerk, the label that publishes Sarah McLachlan, is selling music on the site. Most of the music is from independent bands but with prices as low as 2 to 10 cents for many songs and long samples available to listen to - even the very risk averse can do some looking around for music they like on the site. To be honest, I’m still looking - but I love the model. The most successful songs on the service have been by high school groups who manage to leverage their real-world connections to drive sales online. One such group, Spinlight City from Miami, has the most expensive track right now at 70 cents. Tracks top out at $0.98. Amie Street isn’t the only company experimenting with freedom from DRM and changing price structures. See also the crowdsourced music production of Sellaband, the free listening with heavy DRM of SpiralFrog, the 77 cent tracks with DRM and 88 cent versions without from PayPlay.fm and the feature rich (plus newly funded) music browser Songbird. Music distribution is something that obviously needs some serious reworking. DRM faces growing criticism, music prices are too high and the ease of online distribution is making it clear that major labels (instead of the artists) are taking too much of the money we spend on music. I’m glad to see the release of Amie Street into public beta and hope this or some other innovative model like it finds traction with users. Aime Street [...]
3:52 am
Music Sans DRM On Amie Street « Ray-Deo said:
[...] Amie Street isn’t the only company experimenting with freedom from DRM and changing price structures. See also the crowdsourced music production of Sellaband, the free listening with heavy DRM of SpiralFrog, the 77 cent tracks with DRM and 88 cent versions without from PayPlay.fm and the feature rich (plus newly funded) music browser Songbird. Music distribution is something that obviously needs some serious reworking. DRM faces growing criticism, music prices are too high and the ease of online distribution is making it clear that major labels (instead of the artists) are taking too much of the money we spend on music. [...]
11:08 pm
Swindleeeee!!!!! » Songbird gets an eMusic extension (oh, and $1M too) said:
[...] My apologies for not posting in recent days; work has taken precedence. Here are two quick items to help fill the void for now: First, Pioneers of the Inevitable, the folks behind the open source media player Songbird, have just gotten $1M in venture funding. They’re also about to release version 0.2, but you knew that already, right? [...]
8:47 am
Amie Street Takes Innovative Music Model Into Beta » JenIT said:
[...] Amie Street isn’t the only company experimenting with freedom from DRM and changing price structures. See also the crowdsourced music production of Sellaband, the free listening with heavy DRM of SpiralFrog, the 77 cent tracks with DRM and 88 cent versions without from PayPlay.fm and the feature rich (plus newly funded) music browser Songbird. Music distribution is something that obviously needs some serious reworking. DRM faces growing criticism, music prices are too high and the ease of online distribution is making it clear that major labels (instead of the artists) are taking too much of the money we spend on music. I’m glad to see the release of Amie Street into public beta and hope this or some other innovative model like it finds traction with users. [...]
3:26 am
Cruxy and Songbird at People With Ideas said:
[...] If you haven’t heard of Songbird, its a great new open-source product that has recently received much deserved venture funding. Think of Songbird, as the Mozilla of iTunes - a desktop media player built on the same foundation as applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird. It is a great drop in replacement for iTunes, except for the fact that it doesn’t support the restricted and encrypted files you may have purchased from Apple. That’s where Cruxy comes in… [...]
4:26 pm
Wise Buddha - » Songbird gets $1million and launches cross platform said:
[...] As mentioned back in February Songbird is an interesting music player from the Firefox guys. So interesting in fact that they have just secured additional funding from a couple of seasoned VC’s who obviously see the potential. In other music related news we mentioned a couple of months ago really innovative DRM free music site called Amie Street well they have just announced their Beta launch, the new site is still a bit rough but well worth checking out. Since covering the service in July their user base has increased to around 4,000 users. They have had a couple hundred artists participating in the alpha selling around 2,100 songs. [...]
5:16 am
techcrunch » Blog Archive » Amie Street Takes Innovative Music Model Into Beta said:
[...] the 77 cent tracks with DRM and 88 cent versions without from PayPlay.fm and the feature rich (plus newly funded) music browser Songbird. Music distribution is something that obviously needs some serious [...]
3:24 pm
VentureBeat » Songbird, a browser-integrated media player, received $8M last year said:
[...] we reported in October 2006 that Songbird had taken $1 million from Atlas Ventures and Sequoia Capital, it [...]
2:15 am
Aplikacije.NET said:
Songbird - open source Music player…
Image via Wikipedia
Songbird is an open source music player for Mac ( it is also available for Windows and Linux ). It is new application still being actively developed but if you are adventurous you can give it a go. It can play various audio formats…