Update
Despite switching on the website and launching the Android app, Songl claims that it didn’t actually launch today. A tweet from them says the ‘Official launch of Songl coming soon’.
There was actually two music streaming services that launched in Australia today, although you’d hardly know it. Songl, the joint venture between Sony and Universal, is the renamed anubis.fm that we’ve covered before on techAU. Unfortunately they couldn’t have chosen a worse day for the launch.
Songl’s launch had to compete with the 500 pound gorilla – Microsoft’s Zune Music. After launching internationally a couple of years ago, there was a lot of pent up demand for Zune and actually reasonable brand recognition.
Socially, the last two days have seen twitter flooded with tweets of international attention about Zune’s Australian launch. Sadly the only tweet today about Songl, was from Songl’s own twitter account.
To make matters worse, the Songl iPhone app isn’t available on launch day for download. Instead is currently waiting approval from Apple. With mobile apps being sold as one of the new features that would make Songl better than anubis.fm, it seems like a big miss step. There is however an Android application available.
The last piece of the sad launch for Songl is its integration with Sonos. Unfortunately there’s no Sonos update to remove references to anubis.fm and replace it with Songl.
I’m not sure what kind of budget has been allocated, but I kind of feel bad for them, with this promotional video being the best marketing they can muster.
Overall the only thing that has gone right is the launch of the website, now live you existing and new users can sign in.
More info @ Songl.
