One Step Beyond Oblivion

Beyond Oblivion, the cloud-based service financially backed by News Corp and once tipped as a major competitor to Spotify and iTunes, has folded before launching its ‘Boinc’ service.

The New York based company raised $87 (£55.8m) in funding, all of which has been used to try and build a ‘one stop’ streaming service for music fans. Unlike Spotify, this would be free of advertising and subscription fees and would be built into hardware such as mobile phones. The venture began to gain significant interest from the media and major labels alike when News Corp invested $11.2m in the service, with a proposed beta launch scheduled for autumn last year.

The idea was to have a paid app on android and iPhone for a one-off ‘life of device’ style fee, with the company pledging to pay 70% of its annual revenues to the rights holders, as well as a royalty fee each time a track was played. A micro-payment would apply regardless of the source, meaning in theory that illegally downloaded tracks could generate royalty revenues for artists.

Founder Adam Kidron said in a statement: “Beyond was always a tremendously grand ambition as the advances required by the record labels and music publishers were substantial, reflecting the breadth of the rights required to create a true digital music one-stop”.

You have to question if this was really a case of the advance demands of rights holders or simply the victim of an extremely over-crowded marketplace, especially considering Facebook’s recent expansion of its music service alongside the rise of paid subscriptions to Spotify jumping to £2m and the site’s partnership with Virgin Media last year, which gave customers of the UK’s second largest ISP 6 months free access to a premium service.