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SpiralFrog, the ad-supported peer-to-peer service that was going to save the music industry for at least a week or so last year, is finally in limited beta mode, and it’s offering 700,000 tracks–including selections from Universal Music Group’s catalog–through its service. Silicon Alley Insider, which got a sneak peek, wasn’t impressed, reminding readers that users had to jump through as many hoops as the jumping frog of Calabasas County in order to get their music:
“The music will be locked in a Microsoft Windows Media format and tethered to a PC, which means no iPod compatability. If that doesn’t turn you off immediately, you’ll still need to remember to head to the SpiralFrog site once a month to renew your free subscription, which is where the ads come in.”
Sounds fun! Except, oh wait, I don’t have a PC, so I can’t use the service anyway. (Can you hear the sadness in that statement?)
Other reviews have been trickling in: According to the Canadian tech rag Digital Journal, which went so far to predict that the ‘Frog “will cut straight into Apple’s market share” even though you can’t do things like search for videos, SpiralFrog’s next move is to develop an “iPhone killer” with Samsung–although the author did admit that he won’t ditch his iPod completely, given that Apple’s catalog is currently more robust than SpiralFrog’s. How much do you want to bet that the ‘Frog’s post-beta business plan is betting on people like that dude? If it does have a plan, that is, beyond “getting vaguely positive press from people looking to say something, anything positive about the music industry’s future.”
SpiralFrog Resurfacing? Still Holding Our Breath. [Silicon Alley Insider, via Hypebot]
Those are pretty much the standard hoops for subscription music. Every subscription service — Rhapsody, Napster, Zune — requires the user to connect to the service once a month or so. (Otherwise one could download an album once, cancel the subscription and keep the songs.) The format is not a big deal since no service currently works with the iPod or Apple computers. There are numerous compatible music players. Of course there would be more users if Apple were involved, but the iPod’s exclusion is the norm for this type of thing.
SpiralFrog is a terrible, terrible name.
@coolfer: The other services don’t just rebill attached credit cards?
And wouldn’t it make sense to incorporate ads into the download manager, instead of forcing users to connect to the Web site? For the amount of time that this site has been in development, you’d think that the engineers behind it would at least have made the browsing experience more pleasant than those on already-existing services.
SpiralFrog with a Knife?
Shit. That doesn’t even help.