Holy cow, free music from Universal?!?
Colour me shocked. Stunned, even. A fledgling online music company by the name of SpiralFrog has announced that they're going to make Universal Music's entire North American music catalogue available for free downloading on their website. A test of the service is supposed to start in North America (USA + Canada) by the end of the year, with Britain and other European countries following next year.
Of course, all this free music isn't really free. Instead of spending money, you'll have to spend time to download these songs, and I don't just mean the download time. See, you'll have to watch or listen to ads on their website in order to download the songs and if you want to keep the songs, you'll just have to keep watching ads on the site regularly. As long as the service offers fast download speeds and little to no server downtime, I think people won't mind that too much.
A bigger problem is that SpiralFrog's music offerings will be encoded in Microsoft's WMA format, which isn't compatible with the iPod. Oho. That's a large segment of the digital-music market they're shutting out right there. Is SpiralFrog insane? With a name like that, you'd be tempted to think so, but it looks like they didn't have much of a choice. I'm sure they'd like to support iPod compatibility, but the iPod isn't compatible with any DRM systems but Apple's own FairPlay technology- which isn't and probably can't be used by anyone but Apple.
This leads to an interesting possibility: services like this (I'm sure more- including a yet-to-be-announced service from Kazaa- will be along the way soon) might just erode Apple's dominant position in the digital music market- but only if other hardware manufacturers can get their acts together and start offering compelling alternatives to the iPod. Microsoft's upcoming Zune doesn't count because apparently its only going to support it's own proprietary DRM encoding instead of Microsoft's existing technologies (unless they do an about-face following this news, or try to one-up SpiralFrog with their own free music service). Maybe it's time for Creative to shine?
Still, the big question for me now is simply this: When will we get services like this down here in Asia?
No comments:
Post a Comment