For all the excitement surrounding new ideas about digital music, there’s rarely any follow-up on those concepts. Sure, we’ll get some breathless posts about some great new system for sharing songs or listening to streams, but if it fails, or does only OK, that doesn’t get quite the same amount of coverage. (Unless, of course, it gets sued, at which point it’s a cause célèbre.) So it’s nice to see CNet try to give a once-over to some recent new-media music startups and assess their fortunes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really do much digging. The playlist site Imeem and the ad-supported streaming site SpiralFrog—two companies that have been thought of as not long for this world for a while—get pegged as failures. At the same time, the case for the “success,” the amorphous digital-music site LaLa, isn’t really convincing. MORE »
Posts Tagged ‘spiralfrog’
the new model
Digital Music: Basically, No One Has Any Idea
Why Tech Types Should Never Write About The Music Business, Part XXVIII
A note to whoever put together the “35 Places To Download Free, Legal MP3s” listicle I just found on DownloadSquad: I get it. Your readers are a bunch of mouth-breathing brats who want nothing more than to satiate their seemingly endless appetite for music without actually making an effort to obtain that music beyond right-clicking, and maybe having a wank over the greatness of Trent Reznor from time to time. And you need to cater to, and occasionally pander to, those tendencies. Fine. That’s the world we live in now, for better or worse. But. MORE »
videodrone
Major Labels Creep Further And Further Down The Free-Music Path
EMI has reached deals with ad-supported music services QTrax and SpiralFrog, allowing songs from their catalog to be delivered to users at no cost (well, aside from the opportunity cost of watching ads). Both services now have content from EMI and Universal Music Group available for download, but the majors’ deals with the slightly less embarrassingly named QTrax have a catch: See, QTrax had originally billed itself as a free peer-to-peer service, just before the service’s disastrous non-launch at the MIDEM conference earlier this year. But the words “peer-to-peer” strike fear in the hearts of major-label execs, so people who want to use QTrax for their legal free music will have to use an alternate downloading method. MORE »
Hey, remember the ad-supported download service SpiralFrog, which allowed users to download songs for 30 whole days as long as they sat through a few ads? Was going to change the industry and make music a viable source of income again? No? MORE »
Jumping Back Into SpiralFrog’s Pond: “You Can Download So Much Whitesnake”
Yesterday, an Idolator operative took a spin through the ad-supported download service SpiralFrog and gave us his reactions. Well, today he IMed me with two pieces of news: first, that Monster Magnet was on the service, and second, that the site was “fucking up gloriously right now.” Which meant, of course, that I asked him for more information on how things were going for him today: MORE »
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SpiralFrog: It’s Alive, And It’s Kinda Buggy
A little more than a year after it was first announced to not a lot of excitement, SpiralFrog–an ad-supported free music service that is giving labels two-thirds of its revenue–has opened its doors to U.S. users (at least the ones who are running Windows XP or Vista). Once again, our efforts to actually use the site were hampered by our operating system of choice, so we put a crack Idolator operative up to the task of playing around with the site. Here’s his first impression: “Installing all this Microsoft .NET framework stuff I’ve been avoiding better be worth it.” Hey, it’s worth it for us. More reactions after the jump. MORE »
The Spiralfrog deathwatch begins: The much-hyped ad-supported music service “has burnt through $12 million in the past two and a half years and says it will need to raise at least $18 million to make it another 12 months.” MORE »
Ad-Supported Music Service You Probably Forgot About Limps Into Beta
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: MORE »
Liner Notes: SpiralFrog May Be On The Verge Of Croaking
- SpiralFrog, the ad-supported peer-to-peer service that trumpeted its deals with major labels before launching a product, has experienced a mass exodus of executives in the past week. Not to say we told you so, but … MORE »
Ad-Supported Download Service Not Quite Ready To Croak Yet
Forbes is reporting that SpiralFrog, the ad-supported music download site that forces its users to listen to 90-second ads before downloading a song, is behind schedule; it won’t launch until sometime next year. MORE »
