Downward Spiral in the Music Biz?

By Ian, on August 30th, 2006

News has emerged about a new music download service, SpiralFrog, due to launch in December. This story has been extensively covered on boingboing and Techcrunch. However, if you’ve missed it, the gist is that the service will offer the Vivendi Universal Music Group catalogue for free download. Talks are underway with EMI and other labels. Cool.

But obviously, there’s a catch. Actually, there are several catches that have already disenchanted commentators:

The service will be ad-supported. You will be forced somehow to watch adverts as you browse and download.
The music will be in Microsoft’s digitally protected format, so you can’t share it, or play it on an iPod.
You will have to re-visit the site from time to time, possibly monthly, to extend your license for the music. It’s not known yet whether if you download songs every day for a month, that means you’ll have to go back every day from then on.
There is talk that the your license for downloaded tracks will run out altogether after six months.

The service has an extensive and experienced board and management team. But errmm. does anyone remember freeloader.com? Basically, it was a site that allowed people to download games for free, but you had to watch adverts as you downloaded, the games would only work on the downloader’s machine and connected back to the site to check their licences. As I recall, they went tits-up in 2001.

You might argue that near universal broadband penetration makes such a business model a lot more likely to succeed now, and that, in any case, the dotcom crash would have killed freeloader’s ad revenues even if the service would have been successful otherwise. In some ways I am sure that is true. Except that (a) forcing people to watch adverts is a terrible idea, especially if your target demographic is Generation Y; (b) forcing users to go back to your site every month is really bad; © teenagers don’t think copying CDs is a crime — I would assume that would also apply to P2P music networks like SoulSeek.

Update: I’ve ruminated about this thing a bit. I reckon as a mass market service, with a massive ad budget, they’ve got a chance. Most web users only visit six sites.