SpiralFrog is a music-industry-approved free-music site. According to the article, it'll have a large catalog, but will be in DRM'd WMA and will require frequent revisits to the site in order to keep the music active. It's supposed to be ad-based, so I imagine that you'll have to sit through ads each time.

What I wonder is how intrusive the ads will be, how they're going to prevent people from automating the process and how intrusive that will be. Of course, we all know ways around the DRM (which will, of course, reduce quality, but if it's for one of those songs that you don't have an interest in paying a dollar for, who cares?).

Anyone have any thoughts? At the very least, it sounds like a good way to check out some new music. Well, other than the fact that it'll actually only be big-label recordings and nothing a large segment of the population will be interested in.

Unanswered questions:

- What's the bitrate / sound quality of the tracks that will be available from this service? Better or worse than iTMS? Better or worse than 128kbit MP3?

- How annoying are their client-side tools? Will they even work offline? Will they try to reach deep into your machine to prevent you from extracting the audio?

- How many weeks until some kind of FairPlay gizmo comes out and breaks the whole thing to smitherines?

For some reason, I hadn't considered that there would be a separate client, a la iTunes. That makes automating it more difficult, but far from impossible.

I still don't believe in the go-to-the-bathroom-while-an-unattended-advertsement-plays revenue stream, but it's hard to complain about free. However, I'm sure they'll find a way to make it complain-about-able.

It still doesn't solve the problem that you can still download the tracks for "free" from other sources without adverts and annoying corperate stuff.

Will this be enough to stop people down loading illegal music? I don't think so.

I think it is amusing how the recording industry still sees it's main stream of income from CD sales, that just can't last much longer. How does Manchester United become the richest football club in the world? By selling every seat at every game? I don't think so, they have adapted their business to fit what people want and are willing to pay for, this is what the recording industry needs to do. I just can't understand what is taking them so long!

Silly ideas like this just confuse the market in my opinion, keep it simple, just like iTunes

Cheers

Cris.

Have you ever gone looking for something in particular? Wouldn't it be nice to look in one place? I could go on, but the potential convenience could outweigh its failings. Could.

I think it all hangs on where the adverts are, if they put them at the start of tracks then it will never work. I think it would be useful to try new music, but I would never download tracks that had adverts in them, even if they were free.

I run my own system, if I come across some music I may like I download it, if I like it I buy it, simple. I guess this sevice could be useful for that, but I still think they should be thinking more about how they sell their acts to us.

Cheers

Cris.

The record industry in the UK, anyway, is in a sense of false security in an Indian summer where CD sales are actually up: Why?- because they get picked up with the shopping in Tesco.

The spiral frog appeal to advertisers (Remember I've just stopped being one) is to target a demographic of 18 - 35's who don't watch TV, nor read papers and it's very attractive to the ad. agencies to push: " Catching brand loyalty" at a young age. That's why it'll probably succeed: because the advertisers, not the music, will drive the turnover.

It's not going off at a tangent to point out that both Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail Group are launching free newspapers at precisely this market in the immediate future. The business model is that nobody, in the agencies, gave Metro a cat in hell's chance of success, but five years later it's amongst the most highly profitable titles, and I think you'll find that in all these initiatives, the backers are prepared to sit it out and wait

But taking your other point, I don't think it'll make a blind bit of difference to the hardened downloader, who is probably, by now, getting to the top end of the target age group (Or so I read).

N.B. This is a pretty UK slanted view of the situation!

As I read it the ads will be only on the "site" - in practice, probably displayed inside the client side software. I see nothing that implies that the ads will be coded into the music files. Also seems that it will only be available to US and Canada, so the rest of the world will have to make do with allofmp3 for a while longer.

Regards

Mark

Nope! You're quite right, I've just wound through the news bulletin, which I happened not to have deleted (I only watch the news in fast forward to cut out the boring bits), and it makes no mention of the UK not getting it, but the bulletin on the BBC website says US/Canada only.

From the article I linked:

Quote:
SpiralFrog, which is privately held and headed by Robin Kent, a former advertising executive, said it expected to start testing its service in the United States and Canada by the end of the year and that it would expand to Britain and other European markets next year.