, one of which is a movie about an ugly beast who gets angry, and the other about a Marvel comic book character. As one of the only studios to support HD DVD directly, Universal is putting all its chips into one can of salsa, whereas a few others are doing both formats. In any case, this is the first we’ve heard of a studio dropping support for a next-gen format. A sign of things to come? Sony having Another Bad Week [Megagames via Slashgear] → Read More
Well it was bound to happen, the big labels are starting to see the light. Universal announced plans today to offer its entire catalog of music for free through a startup service called SpiralFrog. The project is supported entirely by ads. Users of SpiralFrog will be able to load its proprietary software and play Universal songs in Windows Media Player and on two portable devices, the iPod is not supported. The catch, however, is that users will have to log into the site at least once a month to be inundated by ads. If users don’t log in once a month, the DRM’ed files will cease to function. I’m not convinced that ads will be enough to sustain this project, but it’s nice to see some forward momentum at least. Universal to try ad driven music downloads through SpiralFrog – still with DRM [TechCrunch] Universal backs free music rival to iTunes [FT] → Read More
If you’re familiar with this story, see the updated details at the end. Universal Music, the corporate parent behind labels like MoTown, Geffen Records and many more, announced this morning that they will be making their entire catalogue available for free download through New York based startup SpiralFrog.com starting this fall. SpiralFrog will offer free downloads wrapped in a still undisclosed form of digital rights management technology. How tired. Executive bios indicate the company has been around for more than two years, but we’ll see if they were doing anything more than lining up big names for their corporate roster, music partnerships and advertisers for the site. How about coming up with some workable alternative to the pathetic state of DRM with two years of work? Music lovers have been demanding a different business model for some time, and it looks like at least some industry heavy hitters are going to give it a go via SpiralFrog. We’ve profiled several independent sites experimenting with new business models for music lately (Amie Street, Sellaband and Magnatune) but you had to expect the big guys to try something more traditional. See also eMusic, low cost and DRM free. The CEO of Spiral Frog, Robin Kent, was former CEO of advertising firm Universal Mccann. Their CTO, Vesa Suomalainen, was an executive at Microsoft for 12 years. SpiralFrog’s management and directors is made up of a long list of big media execs, like Frances Preston (former President and CEO of BMI) and Jay Berman (former Warner representative to the RIAA). SpiralFrog told the Financial Times that they were in talks with Warner, EMI and Sony-BMG as well. This is clearly big media’s attempt to try free downloads driven by ads, but it’s still caught up in DRM! Is there any chance that the ads will generate enough revenue to cover the costs to be incurred? Perhaps if the site is high profile enough there is. High end clothing retailer Perry Ellis is already lined up to advertise on the site. Sounds like a gamble to me, but we’ll see. Update with details: I just got off Skype with the fantastic Neville Hobson (see FIR), who’s doing PR for Spiral Frog. He wasn’t able to convince me that this was really a compelling service, but he did provide some juicy details. Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that → Read More
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