SpiralFrog
August 30th, 2006
Robin Kent, the head of new online music site SpiralFrog talks a good game:
“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” said Mr. Kent of SpiralFrog in a statement. “SpiralFrog will offer those consumers a better experience and environment than they can get from any pirate site.”
Sounds promising. I’m all for a good user experience.
Wait a minute:
For consumers, SpiralFrog’s free downloads will come with many more strings attached than Apple’s paid ones do. Users of SpiralFrog will have to sit through advertisements, and will be prevented by special 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 monthly to keep access to the music they download. And the songs will be encoded in Microsoft’s WMA format, meaning they will not work on Apple iPod portable music players.
Yes, that’s clearly better than downloading a file that you can play on the most popular brand of portable music player in the world. Pardon me while I put my iPod and my Mac up for sale on eBay…
[Via Daring Fireball]
September 1st, 2006 at 3:36 am
I don’t think you can blame SpiralFrog for a design flaw in the iPod! I would think twice about a player that couldn’t play back WMA or couldn’t be updated to support any codec you’d desire.
September 1st, 2006 at 7:06 am
If WMA is your audio format of choice then by all means do so. But it’s silly to claim that it’s a ‘design flaw’ that the iPod doesn’t play WMA content; isn’t it also a ‘design flaw’ that Windows Media (and the various portable music players based around the WMA format) can’t play music protected by the iTunes Music Store? WMA is a proprietary format too, and every media player out there has to choose which side of the street they want to play on.
Until the record companies see sense and stop insisting on the use of easily-circumvented DRM to protect their major releases, all media players are stuck dealing with this nonsense. Please don’t pretend that Apple are unique in this. (And you should keep in mind that WIndows Media-based players can’t always be updated to support a new codec: if you’re unlucky and your player is just a little too old, or is a model the manufacturer chooses not to supply an update for, you’re screwed.)