Universal Backs Free-With-Advertising Music Rival to iTunes

Universal has apparently agreed to participate in SpiralFrog, an upcoming new music service that plans to make music available without charge, but to get the downloads, you’ll have to sit through advertisements (or perhaps the ads will be attached to the downloaded songs?), and the music will be encoded in a protected WMA format, which means it won’t work on iPods. And users will have to keep coming back to the SpiralFrog web site once per month to watch more ads to keep all of their previous downloads enabled.

I smell yet another dud.

★ Tuesday, 29 August 2006