Free Music From Universal: A Landmark?

"Did you hear about Universal?" a friend asked me at dinner tonight. "They've made their entire catalog of music free, with ads." I practically popped off my chair with surprise--I'd been on a plane all day and therefore a bit out of touch with tech developments.

The Universal Music Group news does indeed involve everything it owns being available for free if you look at ads, although the more I learn about it, the less certain I am whether this is the tipping point that leads to music in general adopting a free model, or simply an intriguing experiment.

The service, due later this year, will be offered by a company called SpiralFrog, which says it would like to sign deals with the other major music labels. Watch a 90-second ad and you can download a song; watch a two-minute one, and you can download a video; to keep them, you'll need to return to SpiralFrog's site and watch more ads. The music will be free, but not freely available, and because the music and copy protection are wrapped up in Microsoft's WMA format, the tunes won't play on the vast majority of audio players out there (read: iPods).

You can't judge a music service until you've tried it--and try this one I will--but on paper, it sounds similar to subscription services such as Rhapsody and Napster, except that ads rather than subscriber fees pay for the content. (Rhapsody and Napster both have free options that give you limited access to music, but full access to everything will cost you.)

None of the fee-basess subscription services have anything like the traction of the iTunes Music Store and its 99-cent downloads. Whether that's because A) the subscription model is unappealing to most folks, B) the fees are too high, C) most music lovers own iPods that won't work with anything but Apple's store (and underdog eMusic); or D) a little bit of all of the above remains open to question. But by doing subscriptions without a fee, SpiralFrog will test an alternate approach. And while there have been ways to listen to free music before, I don't know of any that have provided anything like unfettered access to a library anywhere near as ginormous as Universal's.

One major point in the iTunes Music Store's favor is that, while the songs are copy protected, they're copy protected in a reliable, relatively unobtrusive way that lets the music feel like, well, music. By contrast, all the services based on Microsoft technologies put the copy protection right in your face--and with more than one of them, I've struggled with troubleshooting issues that prevented me from listening to music I'd paid for. When you take the fun out of music, strangely enough, you tend to remove much of the incentive for peopke to give you money for it.

At first blush, SpiralFrog's ad-watching rules sound like work that teeming masses of people may or may not want to go through, even if gets them free music. We'll see. (free, ad-supported music in the form of broadcast radio has worked for everyone involved for decades, but it's the least laborious music listening of all.)

Side note: I'm not remotely a wild-eyed anti-copy protection absolutist. (You want unrestricted access to music at no cost, with no obligations? Write some.) But isn't it preposterous that this far into the digital music revolution, we're stuck with incompatible digital rights management technologies that are frequently annoying, broken, or both? Is there any question whatsoever at this point that bad copy protection is a strong argument against buying digital music?

Me, I still find myself spending most of my music dollar on the archaic, pricey, but reliable and versatile format known as the compact disc...