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EMI Signs On With SpiralFrog

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 1:25 PM - by

SpiralFrog, the online music service that plans to give away music in exchange for watching advertisements, struck a deal allowing it to offer EMI's music library. Universal Music struck a deal with SpiralFrog at the end of August, and the company hopes to sign up additional music labels, too.

The SpiralFrog music service, scheduled to be available in a beta form this November, boasts that users can download music for free, and that it will recoup costs by selling advertising.

In this case, however, "free" comes at a price. The songs will be encoded in Microsoft's WMA format with digital rights management (DRM) protection that prohibits them from playing on a Mac or iPod. Users must log in to their SpiralFrog account on a regular basis or their downloaded songs will stop working. The DRM also prohibits burning the songs to CD for use in other devices.

The company has not yet said exactly how it will entice users to view the ads. Speculation ranges from requiring ads to run before a song downloads to embedding ads in the downloaded music. The requirement to periodically log in to your account, however, makes the service sound more like a subscription-based model than download-and-keep model.

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mahuti said:

member since 09 Jan 2003 with 374 posts, TMO Staff, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Sep 06, 2006 4:24 pm

DOA

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