Doomed to Failure

"Free" music seems to come with an oppresive and stupid amount of hoops to jump through, again and again. Which means, like almost every other attempt to break into Apple's iTunes 99 cent download territory, this too will fail.

For consumers, SpiralFrog's free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple's paid ones. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements and will be prevented by 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 regularly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in the Microsoft WMA format, largely incompatible with Apple iPod portable music players.

How will it fail? Let's count the quick and easy ways.
1. Requiring me to continue viewing ads to keep listening to your overly-DRM'ed music.
2. Not allowing me to use the music in anyway I want to. I.e. on my iPod.
3. Attacking the problem from the record label's perspective rather than from the listener's perspective.

First it was a problem that people were pirating music, now its a problem that too many people are buying their music from iTunes and not from the other "rental" sites. Napster rents music, you don't buy it. Many of the other sites do the same thing. And I don't want to have to manage yet another "service", I just want to be able to listen to the music I want, when I want (as long as its not during business hours, grrrrr!).

Until the record companies realize that people are done jumping through hoops for them, all of these initiatives will fail. In the old times before P2P and digital music the record companies could force users to do all kinds of lame tricks to get their music. Not anymore, the listeners have the leashes now and its time the record companies started doing some tricks of their own or the industry will leave them behind like the old dogs they are.
Tags: SpiralFrog is doomed to fail, itunes