Mercora, an early entrant into the social music and music search space that recently rebranded itself as Social.FM, has shut down and suspended operations. After being tipped off by a source, I tried reaching the company’s executives, but haven’t heard from them. The site has gone black.
“The Company is unfortunately no longer in business and therefore cannot continue its service to you. Regards,. Mercora, Inc.” Over on the Social.FM home page, the company said “To our Valued Customers,. We regret to inform you and apologize for this inconvenience, but Social.FM will be shutting down the system on July 31st, 2008.” The MySpace widgets have also gone on the blink.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company launched in June 2005 and had raised $5 million from Norwest Venture Partners. It was started by Srivats Sampath, the former CEO of McAfee.com, and launched with a pretty nifty P2P radio software client.
Social.FM had planned to make money by selling ads next to music searches that were conducted on its P2P network. It eventually lost out to more visible competitors, like Pandora and Last.fm, and changed its strategy. Like many other music-focused startups, the company had faced some tough times when the royalty rates for webcasting music on the Internet were raised.
22 trackbacks so far
12:58 AM PT
[...] Social music discovery service Social.fm has joined the dodopool, according to a report at GigaOM. [...]
3:02 AM PT
[...] social network in a similar manner to Last.fm, has confirmed it is shutting down. GigaOm carried a tip-off to that effect, now the site is carrying the following message: To our Valued [...]
4:30 AM PT
[...] bitten the dust; the latest service is Social.fm, a portal for Social music delivery as reported by GigaOm. Known as Mercora before it recently re-branded itself to Social.fm, finally pulled the shutters [...]
5:11 AM PT
[...] Social.fm, a music site that was known as Mercora until last year, has officially folded. The shutdown was first reported by GigaOM. [...]
7:31 AM PT
[...] no haber logrado crear una masa crÃtica de usuarios suficiente para justificar sus inversiones (via) [...]
8:22 AM PT
[...] Source. [...]
8:52 AM PT
[...] Social.fm echa el cierre [ENG]gigaom.com/2008/08/03/socialfm-formerly-mercora-shuts-down/ por MundoLibre hace pocos segundos [...]
9:18 AM PT
[...] iLike or one of the other, more successful music sites on the Internet. The news was discovered by GigaOm based on a tip, who went on to find that the company’s site and widgets have all gone down. [...]
9:27 AM PT
[...] The shutdown was first reported by GigaOM. [...]
9:39 AM PT
[...] inconvenience, but Social.fm will be shutting down the system on July 31st, 2008,” thanks to (GigaOM who first [...]
9:40 AM PT
[...] The shutdown was first reported by GigaOM. [...]
9:56 AM PT
[...] cierran, no hay hueco para todos. Y no pasa nada grave, son cosas del mercado y la saturación. Social.fm ha sido la última en bajar la persiana. A pesar de cerrar una ronda de cinco millones de dólares e incluso de llegar a un acuerdo con [...]
10:09 AM PT
[...] Om Malik deu a notÃcia em primeira mão no GIgaOM que a Social.fm encerrou definitivamente as suas actividades. A informação ainda não foi [...]
11:07 AM PT
[...] sad to see Social.FM close its virtual doors. This is the music streaming service formerly known as Mercora that we’ve covered a time or [...]
11:24 AM PT
[...] Mercora No More-a Social.fm, the music service formerly known as Mercora, has ceased operations. The company was always full of interesting ideas, but never settled on one business model, let alone one name. It was originally launched as an eBay-like marketplace that would have let you bid on songs, then switched goals to become a peer-to-peer service that let you stream songs from other folks’ music collections. (It leveraged differences in Canadian copyright law vs. U.S. policy to do this legally, effectively importing music streams across the border.) Its Wikipedia entry says that its mission ended up being “to catalogue and organize the world’s music and make it universally searchable and legally listenable,” a knockoff of Google’s mission (”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Too bad it never fulfilled it; let’s hope somebody else does someday. Read more at: GigaOM [...]
1:06 PM PT
[...] Social.FM, Formerly Mercora, Shuts Down [...]
5:58 PM PT
[...] The shutdown was first reported by GigaOM. [...]
2:12 AM PT
[...] Read more about the close down here: [...]
2:56 AM PT
[...] social network in a similar manner to Last.fm, has confirmed it is shutting down. GigaOm carried a tip-off to that effect, now the site is carrying the following message: To our Valued [...]
9:08 AM PT
[...] social network in a similar manner to Last.fm, has confirmed it is shutting down. GigaOm carried a tip-off to that effect, now the site is carrying the following message: To our Valued [...]
10:02 AM PT
[...] והסט×רט-×פ ×©× ×¢×œ×: Social.FM, שהכיר ×œ×ž×©×ª×ž×©×™× ×ž×•×–×™×§×” חדשה ב××ž×¦×¢×™× ×—×‘×¨×ª×™×™×, סוגר ×ת הב×סטה. [...]
11:34 AM PT
[...] * VC-backed bust: Social.fm [...]
8 comments so far
10:21 PM PT
I don’t understand these fast closures of large-ish websites. Why not stay alive (with barebones staff) and try and settle for a low acquisition?
10:55 PM PT
Well, it’s been very interesting project.
11:11 PM PT
Nice scoop.
When I would get pitched by their firm - and that was alot - it seemed like the messaging was all over the place, and I never was able to grasp what they were supposed to be about after the initial launch.
9:04 AM PT
The music industry continues to change at a rapid pace………one more music website down the drain.
10:33 AM PT
There is no staying a float waiting to be bought when the record companies demand a tax on every play of every track.
9:53 PM PT
Gimme their business plan so i can work it out. Cheers (kidding)
11:37 PM PT
They never understood the internet.
11:46 PM PT
A shame, because I think it was an excellent idea.
I do think there were real problems though. The few times I tried it, I couldn’t get it to work properly. And the way it worked with channels etc was pretty darn confusing.
The WORST thing about the app was that it had a very confusing delete/remove action. If I recall, ‘delete’ meant something different in two different areas of the player/manager. Where you would think it was just delete from your library, it would actually delete music files from your harddrive. Unbelievably, it was a hard delete rather than sending to the recycle bin. I accidentally lost a ton of music this way.
Again, legal P2P radio was an excellent idea and I’d hoped to use it on my website to let my readers listen to my entire music collection. But it was fairly incompetently executed and I can imagine that not working out some fairly major kinks was at least partially to blame for its failure. I also read a few comments saying what’s the point, we have last.fm and pandora. So that seemed to indicate they didn’t get across what they had to offer, which was very unique.
I hope someone else picks up the idea and that can find a way to make it financially viable.