I'd been meaning to write something about the deal Universal Music signed with SpiralFrog to make the label's music available in a free but ad-supported manner. The whole thing seemed to me to be too good to be true and, as is usually the case with such things, it is. So just as I was about to actually write about it, I find that Mark Glaser has pretty much
beat me to the punch. Glaser brings together all the various things that are likely to annoy people about the business model SpiralFrog has in place right now such as:
- You have to listen to a 90-second commercial for every song you download. That's in some cases half as long as the song itself.
- You have to come back to the SpiralFrog site once a month and watch more ads or the songs you've already downloaded with expire.
- There are so many restrictions on the song files that they can't be taken with you very much and, since they're in WMA format, won't be playable on iPods. Plus, you can't burn them to CD.
- The files expire permanently after six months.
- It's unknown whether the artists are getting royalty payments from the labels for the songs being downloaded.
Who's going to agree to these restrictions and requirements in order to listen to music, free or not? It would be interesting to know what advertisers are considering signing on to this. I can't really see this being worth it for them.
1. interesting headphones... how many they stand in evrope???
Posted at 4:10AM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Music