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SpiralFrog Misses December Jump Into Music Market

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 8:20 AM - by

SpiralFrog made waves in August when it announced that it would offer a free and legal music download service by December. The promised launch has yet to happen, and now it looks like it may be late January 2007 before the service starts up, according to Forbes.

The music download service is hoping to generate revenue through online ads instead of track sales. Companies like Perry Ellis, Levi's, Aeropostale, and Benetton have all expressed interest in advertising through SpiralFrog.

Big-name labels Universal Music and EMI have already signed on, as has the independent label Koch Records. SpiralFrog hasn't said how negotiations with other labels including Warner Music Group and Sony BMG.

When SpiralFrog finally launches, it won't be able to offer one feature that the iTunes Store does: Cross-platform support. Music tracks downloaded from the service will be encoded in Microsoft's WMA format with digital rights management copy protection that supports Windows only.

The copy protection also prevents using downloaded songs on an iPod, potentially on Microsoft's Zune player, and also prohibits burning music CDs.

Whether or not an ad-based music download model can last long-term remains to be seen, but recording labels are optimistic. William Crowley, vice president of special markets at Koch Entertainment, Koch Record's parent company commented "Given the general fortunes of Internet advertising, especially rich media advertising, it does appear to me that there's a real opportunity there."

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Dec 27, 2006 12:33 pm

So in other words SpiralFrog offers nothing for just about everyone. You can't use it on a portable player, you can't burn a CD, you can't use it on an iPod which is just about 80% of the market. Worthless free music that is also useless.

My opinion, there wasting there time even bothering to start this up. Just about know one will use it.

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Mikuro said:

member since 15 Jun 2002 with 457 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Dec 27, 2006 2:37 pm

I would use it (if it were Mac compatible). Believe it not, a lot of people have no interest in iPods or any other portable music players. Don't confuse the digital music player market with the digital music market. I have many gigabytes of music and no portable device to put in on — and that suits me just fine. I listen to music on my computer, and that's the ONLY place I listen to music. I don't even own a dedicated CD player anymore.

I believe the market supports many different styles of music delivery. The iTunes Store is great for what it is, but not everyone wants that. I think SpiralFrog's model could be successful in its own right. I really don't think it would compete with the iTunes Store much, though.

This could be the closest (legal) successor to Napster (I mean the original Napster). It could be a great way to discover new music, and it could lead to sales of CDs (or even iTunes downloads).

Pity it'll be WMA-based. Booo!

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Dec 28, 2006 12:19 am

Guest wrote:
So in other words SpiralFrog offers nothing for just about everyone. You can't use it on a portable player, you can't burn a CD, you can't use it on an iPod which is just about 80% of the market. Worthless free music that is also useless.

My opinion, there wasting there time even bothering to start this up. Just about know one will use it.

Not quite. You can't play the songs on an iPod or Zune, but you can probably play them on many other players by Creative, SanDisk, etc.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:56 am

Zaziggy.com does ad supported music for free that you can use on any system. It's independent music, but they filter out the artists and have a pretty good line up. Not huge yet, but growing.

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