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In a rather ironic turn of events, Universal Music, the world’s largest music group, has signed a deal with SpiralFrog to make their entire music catalogue available for download … for free. Under the agreement, Spiralfrog will offer Universal’s songs online in the US and Canada. Setting their sites directly on iTunes, SpiralFrog has based their entire business model on profit-sharing from advertising dollars. Users will have to endure short non-intrusive targetted advertising before actually being able to download their music.

At first glance this sounds rather promising, but one huge component has been left out, possibly intentionally, in the initial press-releases, There is no mention of which audio codec or DRM solution will be used. This could possibly make or break the start-up.

Update: It looks like this frog is ready to croak before it has even left the lilly pad. SpiralFrog will offer the music as Windows Media Files (read: won’t play on iPods) that you can listen to on your PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker — you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! Two thumbs down … way down. Take away the “To Go” feature, and you have a far more ad-laden imitation of the free service launched by Napster earlier this year. Forget the hoop-la, this frog is fried.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 11:17 am and is tagged with apple, news, tech, web. You can discuss this entry, share pictures, and more in the pixelbomb forums. Responses are currently closed, but you can click here to generate a trackback url for your own site.