Universal Music Group has announced that it will be launching a free music download service to compete with iTunes. The format will be Windows .wmv and probably won't work on an iPod. The downloads will be free, but you'll have to sit through ads and return periodically to the site in order to be allowed to keep your music. Oh, and you won't be able to share or copy the songs.
A new online music company said yesterday that it would make a huge catalog of songs from the world’s largest record company, the Universal Music Group, available for consumers to download free.
The company, called SpiralFrog, said its intention was to wean music fans, especially young people, away from illegal downloads and pirate music sites by offering a legitimate source, supported by advertising instead of download fees.
SpiralFrog is the latest to offer a challenge to Apple Computer’s hugely successful iTunes service, which allows consumers to download songs legally for 99 cents each, and its many smaller imitators. Though the venture is not the first to try a free ad-supported approach, the backing of Universal, with millions of songs in its catalog from thousands of artists like Eminem and Gwen Stefani, Elton John and Gloria Estefan, Count Basie and Hank Williams, promises to give it instant credibility and scale.
SpiralFrog, which is privately held and headed by Robin Kent, a former advertising executive, said it expected to start testing its service in the United States and Canada by the end of the year and would extend its service to Britain and other European markets next year.
The announcement reflects the music industry's eagerness to experiment with various digital business models and to find a way to overcome piracy and illegal copying, which remain a big problem despite the record companies' efforts to enforce their copyrights in court.
While the industry has tried to encourage the growth of legitimate alternatives like iTunes, some record executives have begun to chafe at Apple’s dominance in the online market, particularly its insistence on a “one size fits all” pricing model, saying it has restricted the growth of digital sales.
For consumers, SpiralFrog's free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple's paid ones. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements and will be prevented by special software from making copies of the songs they download or from sharing them with other people.
They will have to revisit the SpiralFrog Web site regularly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in the Microsoft WMA format, meaning they will probably not work on Apple iPod portable music players.
The success of SpiralFrog will be directly correlated as to how annoying it is to use. If the ads are endless, the music expires after a week and the selection isn't good, we expect dismal failure. On the other hand, being free is a great motivator, so we'll be interested to see how SpiralFrog sets up the service.
