Free music - with a catch

Universal Music Group will allow its songs to be downloaded for free through a new site called SpiralFrog.com. (No, I don't know what the name means, either.) But users will have to sit through advertisements - and, more importantly, they'll have to keep visiting the site if they want their downloads to keep working:

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 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, largely incompatible with Apple iPod portable music players.

Ad-supported free downloads are probably the future of the music business, but I think many listeners will find the SpiralFrog model way too restrictive. We'll see.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at August 30, 2006 06:16 PM