<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR>The music dies out at Soundbuzz
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Motorola selling online music store in face of stiff competition and change of focus in business </TR><!-- Author --><TR><TD class="padlrt8 georgia11 darkgrey bold" colSpan=2>By Chua Hian Hou
</TD></TR><!-- show image if available --></TBODY></TABLE>
<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->THE buzz is fizzling out at Singapore's first online music store.
Decade-old Soundbuzz will shut down its service on July 15, said a message on its website.
Started in 1999 by media personality Sudhanshu Sarronwal, previously MTV Asia's managing director, the online music store began selling legitimate digital music a few years ahead of Apple's iTunes.
Soundbuzz was resilient, surviving the challenge from services like Napster and Kazaa, which gave netizens free pirated music. It also survived the 2001 dot.com crash that killed rivals like Vivamusic.
In January, Soundbuzz was acquired for an undisclosed sum by Motorola, which was then looking for a way to jump-start its Motomusic service.
But the communications giant has since decided to focus on mobile handsets, so 'this means Motomusic and Soundbuzz are no longer core to our market strategy', said the company's communications and public affairs manager Lynn Chan.
It is in talks with several interested parties to sell off the Soundbuzz outfit, she said.
Motorola is also looking at redeploying Soundbuzz's 60 employees, most of whom are based here, with the rest in Australia and India. Consulting firm IDC's senior market analyst for telecommunications in the Asia-Pacific, Mr Ilham Samudera, is not surprised.
He said Motorola's cellphone business has been languishing and, despite its best efforts, its Motomusic service has wilted in the face of competition from rival music services like Nokia's Comes With Music and Sony Ericsson's PlayNow.
'In these tough economic times, Motorola may have decided to focus on areas in which it is entrenched and is profitable, like its networking equipment business,' he said.
He added that Soundbuzz may have been hit by changes in digital music and cellphone technology in the past few years.�
Although better-known for its pioneering attempt to sell legitimate digital music, the financial backbone of its business is in cellphone ringtones: It sells three million ringtones every year, and only 200,000 digital music tracks.
But revenue from ringtones is likely to have fallen, since the ringtones of most cellphones today come ready to blare in the widely available MP3 format.
Previously, when users had to convert songs to monophonic or polyphonic files to use them as ringtones, those who were not tech-savvy simply bought ringtones from companies like Soundbuzz rather than tangle with the conversion process.
Add to this the fact that paying for legitimate digital music has never been popular to start with, thanks to the availability of pirated music.
Soundbuzz alluded to this as one of the reasons for its demise in its online message: 'Thank you for being a supporter, not just of Soundbuzz, but also of legitimate digital music.' [email protected]
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Motorola selling online music store in face of stiff competition and change of focus in business </TR><!-- Author --><TR><TD class="padlrt8 georgia11 darkgrey bold" colSpan=2>By Chua Hian Hou
</TD></TR><!-- show image if available --></TBODY></TABLE>
<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->THE buzz is fizzling out at Singapore's first online music store.
Decade-old Soundbuzz will shut down its service on July 15, said a message on its website.
Started in 1999 by media personality Sudhanshu Sarronwal, previously MTV Asia's managing director, the online music store began selling legitimate digital music a few years ahead of Apple's iTunes.
Soundbuzz was resilient, surviving the challenge from services like Napster and Kazaa, which gave netizens free pirated music. It also survived the 2001 dot.com crash that killed rivals like Vivamusic.
In January, Soundbuzz was acquired for an undisclosed sum by Motorola, which was then looking for a way to jump-start its Motomusic service.
But the communications giant has since decided to focus on mobile handsets, so 'this means Motomusic and Soundbuzz are no longer core to our market strategy', said the company's communications and public affairs manager Lynn Chan.
It is in talks with several interested parties to sell off the Soundbuzz outfit, she said.
Motorola is also looking at redeploying Soundbuzz's 60 employees, most of whom are based here, with the rest in Australia and India. Consulting firm IDC's senior market analyst for telecommunications in the Asia-Pacific, Mr Ilham Samudera, is not surprised.
He said Motorola's cellphone business has been languishing and, despite its best efforts, its Motomusic service has wilted in the face of competition from rival music services like Nokia's Comes With Music and Sony Ericsson's PlayNow.
'In these tough economic times, Motorola may have decided to focus on areas in which it is entrenched and is profitable, like its networking equipment business,' he said.
He added that Soundbuzz may have been hit by changes in digital music and cellphone technology in the past few years.�
Although better-known for its pioneering attempt to sell legitimate digital music, the financial backbone of its business is in cellphone ringtones: It sells three million ringtones every year, and only 200,000 digital music tracks.
But revenue from ringtones is likely to have fallen, since the ringtones of most cellphones today come ready to blare in the widely available MP3 format.
Previously, when users had to convert songs to monophonic or polyphonic files to use them as ringtones, those who were not tech-savvy simply bought ringtones from companies like Soundbuzz rather than tangle with the conversion process.
Add to this the fact that paying for legitimate digital music has never been popular to start with, thanks to the availability of pirated music.
Soundbuzz alluded to this as one of the reasons for its demise in its online message: 'Thank you for being a supporter, not just of Soundbuzz, but also of legitimate digital music.' [email protected]
