free music (legal)
Man, that title is going to up my Google hits.
Anyway:
Universal Music, the world's largest music company, has agreed to back a new venture that will allow consumers to download songs for free and instead rely on advertising for its revenues.
The new service, known as SpiralFrog, represents a departure from the 99-cent per-song business model made popular by Apple's iTunes store. It will begin operations in December.
Howevs:
Regardless, out of the 194 news stories listed by Google News, not a single one of them mentions which format the service would use, or how it would be protected – a pretty big oversight in my opinion, considering how serious the 'competing formats' obstacle is in online music right now (especially for companies such as SpiralFrog, which distribute music that won't play on iPods).
It turns out that it will use WMA files, which do not play on iPods. So, ok, free music is great, and if it's legal, all the better. And you're going to get a ton of headlines with just the words "free music." But I've always been puzzled by the anti-iPod strategery that lots of competing online music stores are using. Napster, Rhapsody, AOL, SpiralFrog... they all use WMA (which is Microsoft's format) for their music, which doesn't play on iPods (unless you burn it to a cd, then re-rip it into a compatible format). iPods, though, have something like 75% of the market share for portable music players. How much business do these guys expect to get, realistically?
To me, iPods and iTunes (or the Russian site) are still the shit. iPods are still the coolest looking, and definitely have the most street cred. I mean, nobody leans over on the bus and says to you, "Hey man, that's a bad-ass iRiver T30," or, "Is that a new Samsung YP-F2JZW?" Is it a drag to pay like 99 cents for a song? Yeah, but it's also kind of a bargain. Plus, you can do whatever you want with it, really: burn it on cd, play it wirelessly in your house, play it on your iPod, whatevs. It seems completely ridiculous to me to have to visit a website every month just to re-up the DRM on my music, or to not be able to burn it on cd when I want. It comes down to the fact that you don't really own the music, you're just renting it. And you have to give it back.