Universal to Back SpiralFrog

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

The world’s largest music company, Universal Music, is backing a start-up, SpiralFrog, that will allow consumers to download songs for free, relying on advertising for its revenues.

The move reflects music companies’ willingness to experiment as they try to capture some profit from the boom in digital distribution still dominated by illegal file-sharing networks.

The service, SpiralFrog, represents a departure from Apple’s 99 cents-a-song business model and other legal download services which charge a subscription fee by being completely free. It is due to start up in December.

Mr Kent has held talks with labels Warner, EMI and Sony-BMG and hopes they will be lured by the surge in online advertising.Source: Financial Times

According to Techcrunch the downloads will contain our old friend the DRM,

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker - you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads. Source: TechCrunch

We Say: I like the sound of the free downloads, but logging in at least once a month just to view ads doesn’t sound good. Who wants to bet this is cracked before they release it? I guess we’ll see how the service and DRM is after it launches.