Allihoopa is closing down

On January 17th, 2019 Allihoopa (allihoopa.com) will be turned off and all the data will be removed. 

Allihoopa was an interesting platform for collaboration using mobile apps. They started of as part of Propellerhead Software, known for their Reason DAW software, but later on got there own legal identity. The focus was on mobile music making and giving the end user a limited sets of tools. The apps Figure and Take are good examples of this. Must say though that both felt a bit amateurishly and limited to me.

Why are they quitting?

Simply, we can no longer afford to be in business.

– allihoopa.com/info

It’s hard to say how they made money. If they made any money! Maybe they firstly wanted to create a massive amount of users ’cause everything by Allihoopa was free, the webservice, the apps.

The player on their website looked a bit like SoundCloud’s and worked nicely. As an audio hosting platform Allihoopa was used by many people even professional Reason users for marketing purposes. I can imagine Propellerhead using that audio engine for their own audio demos and those of the developers (RE and ReFill developers like myself). But I know that Propellerhead themselves are using SoundCloud for this, like everybody in the industry does. SoundCloud is a perfect audio solution.

Although Allihoopa was focussing on collaboration, I guess this is not enough of an unique factor to create a winning platform. Even SoundCloud is struggling money wise. And so is Spotify and many others. Succeeding online with a hosting service is extremely difficult. And focussing on young amateurs (I guess that was the target group) is tricky since these people might not have much money to spend.

They made a seriously wrong decision from the start by not using Creative Commons licenses but to ask the end-user to “wave all their rights”. The service started in 2014 and was named Propellerhead Discover. I didn’t understand what they were trying to achieve with it. At the time Propellerhead’s website showed a picture of a guy with an iPhone in his hands… What was Propellerhead thinking?

As a result I don’t think any professional music maker was interested in seriously using Allihoopa. There was this general feel of being amateurish. And although they changed the copyright terms in Nov 15, 2017, I guess it was a little to really fix the bad start. But even then Allihoopa didn’t switch to using Creative Commons licenses but offered their own license. A serious mistake in my opinion because the Creative Commons are an online succes and are available in all languages and for countries.

I hope that the people behind Allihoopa don’t give up their hope to create cool software and services. Figure and Take looked and worked nicely. Same for the Allihoopa website. Maybe they should focus a little bit more on professionals like myself. Maybe reunite with Propellerhead and make Reason great again (hint: performance issues)!