SpiralFrog to Offer Free Downloadable Music
Posted by Emru Townsend | Tuesday, August 29, 2006 6:10 AM PT
New York-based
SpiralFrog has teamed up with Vivendi Universal to
offer free downloads from Universal's music catalog later this year. As you might have guessed, "free" means "advertiser-supported," but there are questions that must still be answered. First, are they really releasing the entire Universal catalog, or just the most popular artists/albums? (I'd like to think the former, but since SpiralFrog declares its target audience to be between the ages of 13 to 34, it's probably the latter.) Second, if these are DRMed WMA files (as they most likely are), then is this really a viable alternative to iTunes, since iPods don't do WMA? And finally, will making DRMed files free lower the resistance of people like me to them?
I'm not at all interested in this because: 1)users will NOT be able to burn these tracks to CD, and 2) users must re-register monthly to be able to play the tracks they have downloaded.
If this was really FREE, once you downloaded a track, you could burn it to CD and that would be that.
DRM needs to DIE!