(UPDATE 3) Beyond Oblivion has sung its last song before launching its first product, a music service dubbed "boinc". Funded by News Corp, The Wellcome Foundation and media investment bank Allen & Co, the company burned through $87 million since opening in 2008. Founder Adam Kidron blamed demands for advances to labels and publishers for the failure.
Beyond Oblivion touted "boinc", as a cloud based music service supported by device manufacturers paying a one-time life-of-device fee alongside micro-royalty per play payments whether the original file had been downloaded legally or illegally.
Kidron confirmed that the Beyond Oblivion was closing in a statement that blamed the company's failure on the difficulty of “co-ordinating the diversity of the ecosystem” which includes artists, labels, publishers and device manufacturers".
“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,” said Kidron, who ended with: “Until victory always.”
UPDATE: Under the banner "You can't make this stuff up", Dalton Caldwell points to this now ironic Gaurdian piece on Beyond Oblivian from March 2011:
Beyond Oblivion, the online music marketplace partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has secured $77m (£47m) in additional investment ahead of its worldwide launch later this year.
“The fledgling company plans to unveil its “liberated music” marketplace in September. Negotiations with the four major record labels – Universal, Warner Music, Sony and EMI – are at a “very advanced stage”, according to the Beyond Oblivion founder and chief executive, Adam Kidron…
“We’re going to launch with $500m revenue guarantees, and we pay a large proportion of that – between 70% and 90% – back to content owners.
The News Corp chief digital officer, Jon Miller, added: “Our additional investment in this business serves as an endorsement of the progress that Beyond Oblivion has made in bringing this innovative new music product to market.”
Note: A previous verison of this story had misnamed the defunct service as bionic. It was to be called "boinc".
