EXCLUSIVE: Interview With “Future Of Music” and SongSpot’s Gerd Leonhard

Gerd Leonhard may be best known as the co-author of The Future Of Music: A Manifesto For Digital Music, consultant and frequent speaker at industry conferences. But he’s also the CEO of Sonific, a start-up that has created SongSpots – incredibly easy to create and use widgets that enable single song players on blogs, social networking sites, web sites and more.

Buzz is increasingly generated virally and online.  But music needs to be heard to be appreciated and SongSpots solves that problem. Now when journalists or fans are writing about music, they can drop a full song right into their post with ease and at no cost. 

HYPEBOT: Your new product at Sonific is SongSpots which is currently in beta. Am I correct that you are currently testing primarily with CDBaby acts? GL: Yes, but we are adding another 25000 tracks in a few days, from various indie labels including Cooking Vinyl (UK). We expect to have a lot more well-known tracks shortly, too!

HYPEBOT: When and how can other acts become involved? GL: We will be announcing a new program for acts and labels shortly!

HYPEBOT: How are licensing issue handled? GL: Sonific covers public performance where / when applicable, the label / artist provides the master recording for free – they make $ from the click-thru sales (like us).

HYPEBOT: What is the revenue model to support this free service?  GL: We promote all kinds of services around the music: downloads, CD sales, ringtones etc, and get commissions from that. We will also have targeted ads on the gateway pages (i.e after you click on the songspot), plus we will offer ‘preferred search result’ placements — but all this will be announced later this year 😉

HYPEBOT: Do you or Sonfic have anything else in the works that you can share? GL: Not quite yet, but soon — and it will have some serious impact.

Here’s an example of a SongSpt that took 1 minute to create: