Spicy Stuff

SpiralFrog - Free Music

There have been a number of websites and P2P programs which allow you to download music for free. However, most of them are illegal. The legal ones charge you per download. Not all who charge are legal, you must check before you download.

The good nows is that now fans will be able to "legally" download songs free for the first time from a major provider - after the world's biggest record company Unicersal Music announced its tracks are to be made available on a website funded by advertising. The name of the website is SpiralFrog.com. Call it Spiral Frog.

I just tried opening the website www.spiralfrog.com, it gives me a message saying coming soon. This is as on August 30th. The service is scheduled to begin sometime in December 2006 in North America. The company plans to launch in Europe in the first quarter of 2007.

Universal Music, home to acts such as U2 , the Scissor Sisters, Texas, Gwen Stefani and Shania Twain, has given its backing to an online-start up called SpiralFrog. The New York-based firm plans to offer songs for free download and pay the record label through money raised from advertising. The tie-up with Universal adds a potential 300,000 tracks to its library.

What is interesting to watch will be the competition with iTunes. The format of the songs on SpiralFrog will be in Microsoft's WMA format, which does not play on the iPod! Now it will be interesting to watch how the music player's market changes. If Spiral Frog is successful, iPods will take a hit and the other brands will get some market share. Wonder what iPod fanatics will have to say about this.

SpiralFrog uses the WMA format because users will not be able to swap songs with other net surfers because of a technology called digital rights management. Devised by Microsoft, the system effectively ties music tracks to the machine they are downloaded to and makes them unplayable on other computers. SpiralFrog users will also not be able to burn their downloads to CD.

A report released last month by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) revealed there were still 40 illegal downloads for every legal one. The voracious appetite for downloads was further illustrated by a prediction from the IFPI that 60 million MP3 players will be sold globally this year.

Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling. However it would be interesting to see whether SpiralFrog's business model will make them the kind of money they expect. Many online businesses including Microsoft are depending on advertising to generate revenues. Will the online advertising spend be good enough to generate profits to all these companies? We have yet to see what limitations might be imposed on the SpriralFrog service and I suspect users may well combine it with illegal file-swapping services.

Napster, the file-sharing service that pioneered the boom in illegal song swapping before turning itself into a legal company, is also trialling the concept of adverts for music. A new version of Napster allows consumers to listen to up to five tracks free while they view advertising.

posted by Arun @ 4:05 AM