Comment 2 for bug 439497

I received the same error as well.

I have attached the output that I received when I started up songbird in the terminal.

However, I think the problem may be on songbird's side because songbird is trying to use the gstreamer plugins provided by songbird instead of using the ones already installed by ubuntu.

After doing some searching on google, I and many others have been able to fix the problem (Of songbird not starting) by deleting the gstreamer plugins that are provided by songbird.

To delete them, go to the directory where songbird is installed and: rm lib/libgst*

See http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1306200.html
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17082