More on SpiralFrog
If yesterday’s news about a new, ad-supported service to offer free digital music downloads seemed too good to be true, it was.
For consumers, SpiralFrog’s free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple’s paid ones do. 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 monthly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in Microsoft’s WMA format, meaning they will not work on Apple iPod portable music players.
Brilliant. Offer free music to people, but not in a format they want or can use. Who wants to listen to music on Windows Media Player?
No iPods? Imagine if audio cassettes had been specially magnetized somehow to be incompatible with the Walkman.
I wonder how many people who have never bought an mp3 will try out SpiralFrog, get sick of having to watch the ads and sit in front of their computers to listen to their music, and then decide that 99 cents really isn’t a lot to pay for a song.
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