Last spring we wrote about SongHi Entertainment and their launch of a closed beta product that helped easily create music with virtual instruments in a collaborative environment. Six months later, SongHi is a social music service that allows anyone to start playing and sharing their own music with a game-like interface in the browser. SongHi is live in the Nordics and Baltics, has partnership deals with Sony Music Finland and Universal. Also, it already started generating its first modest revenue this October. The point of the game is to create your own music and become famous among other users. SongHi's artificial intelligence is used to make sense of the amateur's music, making any mediocre player sound great. If you've been an active user, the game rewards you with stars to up your rankings, but you'd need to buy SongHi coins to purchase virtual items like intruments or fancy decorations for your virtual studio. You can't buy your way into fame but you can make it substantially easier by being a good consumer!  

Partnership deals with record labels allowed SongHi use Sony's and Universal's content like celebrity's vocals and trademarks like Justin Bieber's guitar. Users can purchase those vocals or instruments in the game and compose their own music with them. For instance, during the summer SongHi attracted many users after launching similar-sounding instruments to the ones used in Shakira's 'Waka waka' song. Apocalyptica even recorded exclusive sounds for SongHi to be used in the game. Since game's main target group is teenagers interested in music, SongHi can also offer interactive engament with youth brands. Earlier this year they piloted that concept with Jaffa drink: users could create a Jaffa song using unusual sounds that had to do with the drink's bottle.

SongHi gets about 100 000 unique visits monthly, though only about 8% register and out of that about 1,5% become very active users. There are currently over 10 000 users of the service who altogether have listened to the created songs more than 200 000 times. The number is quite modest but SongHi is hoping to reach 40 000 registered users by the end of the year and later expand their service to UK.

SongHi's graphics are cute and simple and the game's competitions offer some nice perks: from recently released Stam1na's record to a year's subscription to Spotify Premium for six people to a Miami trip to meet the Justin Bieber! Few users are purchasing items yet but SongHi is hoping to make users active first and get their money later. Though there's been great progress in the past six months, SongHi would need to work harder and better to get more active users and enter foreign markets.