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Decade-old Soundbuzz will shut down its service on July 15, said a message on its website.
Started in 1999 by media personality Sudhanshu Sarronwal, previously MTV Asia's managing director, the online music store began selling legitimate digital music a few years ahead of Apple's iTunes.
Soundbuzz was resilient, surviving the challenge from services like Napster and Kazaa, which gave netizens free pirated music. It also survived the 2001 dot.com crash that killed rivals like Vivamusic.
In January, Soundbuzz was acquired for an undisclosed sum by Motorola, which was then looking for a way to jump-start its Motomusic service.
But the communications giant has since decided to focus on mobile handsets, so 'this means Motomusic and Soundbuzz are no longer core to our market strategy', said the company's communications and public affairs manager Lynn Chan.
It is in talks with several interested parties to sell off the Soundbuzz outfit, she said.
Motorola is also looking at redeploying Soundbuzz's 60 employees, most of whom are based here, with the rest in Australia and India. Consulting firm IDC's senior market analyst for telecommunications in the Asia-Pacific, Mr Ilham Samudera, is not surprised.
He said Motorola's cellphone business has been languishing and, despite its best efforts, its Motomusic service has wilted in the face of competition from rival music services like Nokia's Comes With Music and Sony Ericsson's PlayNow.
'In these tough economic times, Motorola may have decided to focus on areas in which it is entrenched and is profitable, like its networking equipment business,' he said.
Read the full story in Tuesday's edition of The Straits Times.
