Tunesquare falters

Over the weekend we received a rather polite, but sad, e-mail from the Tunesquare team
"We created TuneSquare with the hope to see artists getting paid for making their musical works available for free download through our site. While the overall response from artists and members has been positive, there are some aspects of this service that haven't worked out quite as well as we had hoped.

So why have we temporarily stopped making payments to artists on TuneSquare? The short answer is that the continued operation of this ad-supported music download service is a very expensive enterprise that requires an emormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide at the moment. Traffic stats at this point are simply not high enough to generate sufficient advertising revenue. This, in addition to high developing costs has resulted in slow website development which has resulted in delayed press releases which has resulted in...well, you get it...

So, instead of saying farewell, completely shutting down and cease to exist, we have decided to spend our remaining assets on further developing this website -- something that we unfortunately have been unable to focus on for a very long time. And we apologize for that.

The killer line is that one about traffic stats - to rely on advertising revenue to finance a site you really have to have, and maintain, a high profile