Starting on or about December ‘06, you will be able to download much if not most of Universal Music’s music for free…provided you agree to watch some ads first. Viewing about 90 seconds of Perry Ellis or Levi’s commercials may get you 1 song by Ludacris. The music download service will available at SpiralFrog, and will require a monthly ‘re-viewing’ of the ads to keep the music playing. Hmm, let’s see if we’ve got this right…a 30GB capacity digital music player holds about 7,500 songs, which would require 7500 x 1.5 minutes = 7.8 days of solid ad watching each & every month to acquire the music in the first place, and subsequently to keep the music going…we’re guessing here, but that seems somewhat excessive.

Part of the Universal/Spiral strategy is to win back market share from iPod/iTunes and to counter all those free/illegal downloads (you know who you are) by moving away from the ‘fee-based’ business model. According to IFPI, there were an estimated 20 billion free songs illicitly acquired in 2005, and according to the curmudgeon, er, musician Bob Dylan, “Everybody’s gettin’ music for free …[because] …it ain’t worth nothing anyway“…hmm, sounds paradoxical.

Universal backs free music rival to iTunes - Financial Times, August 29 2006

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