Just this week Amazon rolled out Prime Music to all subscribers of its video and shipping service, adding one more competitor to an already crowded market. However, tempering that good news was a bit of sadness, as one other service has announced it will be closing its virtual doors very soon.
Earbits, an up and coming competitor in the space, is announcing it will close up shop on June 16th. Earbits was never a major player in the field, but it provided an alternative option, and was a benefit to aspiring artists, so the loss will be felt by many.
Founder and CEO Joey Flores has released a statement saying, in part, "Shutting down a company after 4.5 years is going to be painful for anybody but is particularly painful for us here at Earbits. Most startups validate over the course of a few years that their concept is inherently flawed, or that the economics of it would not work out at scale. For Earbits, nothing could be further from the truth. We proved to ourselves and a substantial number of artists and listeners that our concept does work, that our vision is what the industry and larger streaming providers need to be doing in order to create more value, but that we simply needed a lot more capital to pursue such an aggressive mission properly. In trying to build a digital media, two sided marketplace in an already tough industry, it appears we bit off more than we could chew".
The news may be bad, but customers today have plenty of choices, with the aforementioned Amazon Prime, Google Music All Access, Spotify, Pandora, Beats, Rdio and others.
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