A company called SpiralFrog announced today an ad-supported music download service with songs from Universal Music Group, set to launch in beta at the end of this year. We hear about ad-supported movie download proposals all the time, forgetting that online music still hasn’t exhausted all the possible business models.
It’s an interesting concept, but how many times are you really going to want to sit through an ad before you decide to buy your favorite song somewhere else? Or maybe that’s the point. Update: News reports are saying the way the business model will work is users will have to watch ads at SpiralFrog once a month if they want their downloads to keep working. The press release is quite earnest, calling SpiralFrog’s “target audience — people between the ages of 13 and 34″ “an advertiser’s dream.” Isn’t that a bit of a tautology?
SpiralFrog has an uphill climb ahead to win enough of an audience to make advertising worthwhile. We also have to assume the company’s downloads won’t be compatible with the iPod, since it indicates they will have copy protection.
SpiralFrog seems a little less like an “upstart” the more we look into it. It appears that the company is more than two years old, though we hadn’t heard of it till now. Every person we call has a secretary! The board of directors is already pretty swollen, with eight well-pedigreed representatives already. We have put requests to find out about the funding situation.
In other music news today, AOL relaunched its online music store to all comers following its purchase of Music Now last year.
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