Psonar Blog

It’s been interesting and valuable to engage with so many ex-Lala users recently. As a community, they seem to have a clear idea of what they want and expect from an online music service.

From their comments, blog posts and tweets, it’s clear that what upsets people most is when a Web 2.0 business fails to honor the bargain implicit in the Web 2.0 ideal: the community provides the ethusiasm, dynamism and much of what draws others to the service (and therefore the business) in return for having a real say in how the service (and therefore the business) evolves. By selling out to Apple on terms which allowed Apple to simply walk away from the service that Lala had committed to provide to its users, Lala broke this essential bargain.

At Psonar we want to build ‘simply the best place to keep your music’ but we also see ourselves as a true Web 2.0 community and business – in that order. Call us romantics perhaps, and we’re not so stupid that we don’t recognise that circumstances change, but at Psonar we believe that enabling the community to drive the shape of the service will lead to a better, more compelling user experience and a more successful business. But it can only work if we do honor the bargain implicit in the Web 2.0 ideal and, to that end, we believe that we must make these pledges:

• Keep your music safe and accessible on our servers and, if events beyond our control make this impossible to sustain, give you adequate notice of any change and an easy way to move your music to wherever you want.
• Let you access the music you have bought when you want and how you want (by download or by streaming).
• Promote the interests of artists, and those who enable artists to record and sell their music, by ensuring fair payment to access music you don’t already own and preventing unlawful file sharing.

We’re grateful to many people for their comments, tweets and blog posts encouraging us to carry on building Psonar while making sure that it really does listen to its community.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 11:58 am and is filed under Company, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.