SpiralFrog fights piracy with free music. But…
by Ruth Suehle
SpiralFrog debuts with free, ad-supported music downloads
The good: SpiralFrog spent a year overcoming music licensing issues and finally launched with over 700,000 songs and 3,500 music videos, all for free.
The bad: The service requires you to live in the U.S. or Canada and to use Windows Media Player 10 or 11 under Windows XP or Vista. Why?
The ugly: DRM. If you don’t log in and look at ads at least once a month, all the music you’ve downloaded will be disabled. You can’t burn the music to a CD or put it on your iPod or Zune. SpiralFrog songs will play only on Windows Digital Rights Management players with the Windows “PlaysForSure” logo.
So the music is free, in exchange for your email address, age, gender, and your ZIP code or province/territory code, plus your monthly return to the site and limited usage options. If it keeps getting used like this, “free” is going to need another entry in the dictionary so we know what it means.
September 20th, 2007 at 4:16 am
This just goes to show just how nefarious DRM is. People shouild just ignore SpiralFrog.
Sadly, this also represents another attack — albeit unwitting — on the concept of free music. If the term can mean anyhting marketers want it to mean, then it means nothing at all.
September 25th, 2007 at 6:29 am
Good, Bad, Ugly indeed! However one bad egg doesnt have to ruin the whole farm! I think there is a real possibility for ad funded free music being a success, so long as there arent too many restrictions on the user. Spiral does restrict too much, fact. But I did find a UK based Ad funded free music model called www.we7.com. This allows the user to download the file to keep, DRM free, compatible with PCs and Macs and all players, and you can burn tracks onto CDs. There is no obligation to return to the site once having used it. The business is backed by Peter Gabriel and it seems a lot more artist friendly. Check it out! we7.com