SpiralFrog signs EMI to adware Music Service

September 7, 2006 2:08 p.m. by Eric Solomon

The only thing people can agree on with regards to SpiralFrog is the inherent goofiness of the name. The service promises free music downloads, so long as you're willing to sit through a Budweiser commercial or whatever their demographic studies determine is the best product for you. They've had Universal signed on, and just added another of the Four Families, EMI to the roster. They've also gained the license to make lyrics available for customers, so if you were having trouble transcribing the words to James Blunt's complicated lyrical journey "You're Beautiful", cheers!
A music service that offers songs broken up by commercial breaks? Sounds suspiciously like that ancient technology ... what's it called ... radio? Of course, this lets you download songs, which sets it apart, right? Well, here's a list of purported restrictions with the SpiralFrog service:

You have to listen to a 90 second commercial for each track you download

You have to return to the SpiralFrog site once every month so the tracks don't expire

The tracks are in protected WMA format, so they're not going on your iPod and they're not easily transferable to MP3 players or other computers

Files expire after six months

DRM copy protection is bad enough, but whoever thought to couple it with advertising gets their own customized circle of hell. The service is set to launch in December.

4 Responses

September 7, 2006 at 2:12 p.m.

Eric Solomon

Have we hit the expiration date on James Blunt jokes yet? Probably, but he did win some MTV award recently...

September 7, 2006 at 2:21 p.m.

acb

what a god awful idea...who would partake in such a service? nice post though, its good to hear that there are still people thinking up moronic products.

September 12, 2006 at 12:10 a.m.

Dave Park

Awful idea.

September 13, 2006 at 3:34 p.m.

prefix » Blog Archive » Prefix Tech Re

[...] It’s a confusing world out there - CD’s may be giving way to electronic media, but the industries in charge aren’t doing so with the consumer in mind. The RIAA sues grandmothers without computers and the children of dead men. Every service out there, including Urge, includes some sort of Digital Rights Management designed to restrict you in your usage of downloaded music and other media. The two dominant standards, Apple’s FairPlay and Microsoft’s PlaysForSure, have both been undermined recently by determined hackers. This leads to an odd tug-of-war; clearly consumers are dissatisfied with DRM which restricts even the honest folk who dutifully pay their $0.99 for an iTunes track, but the attempts to resist DRM gives studio execs more compulsion to enforce standards. Instead of trying to find a common standard that would let people play their iTunes tracks on iPods and other devices, they move backwards with silly schemes like combining DRM with advertisements. [...]

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