aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Not nearly enough of a leap
A new online music company said yesterday that it would make a huge catalog of songs from the world’s largest record company, the Universal Music Group, available for consumers to download free.
The company, called SpiralFrog, said its intention was to wean music fans, especially young people, away from illegal downloads and pirate music sites by offering a legitimate source, supported by advertising instead of download fees.
Ok, I’m listening. I Like the idea of making the ad deal explicit. I tune in to some advertising, I get some stuff. The trouble is the content industry thinks their stuff is worth a whole lot more advertising than we do:
For consumers, SpiralFrog’s free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple’s paid ones. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements and will be prevented by special software from making copies of the songs they download or from sharing them with other people.
They will have to revisit the SpiralFrog Web site regularly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in the Microsoft WMA format, meaning they will probably not work on Apple iPod portable music players.
Spiral Frog will spiral down the toilet if they think we’re going to like that. I think I hear one flushing:
“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” Mr. Kent of SpiralFrog said in a statement. “SpiralFrog will offer those consumers a better experience and environment than they can get from any pirate site.”
The Listening Post suspects the Spiral Frog buzz is just Crazy Frog redux and none of us will be talking about it in a couple months. I concur.
