Spiralfrog.com, an ad-supported free download service, launched today, and your iPod isn’t invited to the party. By the way, doesn’t that idiotic name bring you back to those heady internet startup days, when companies seemed to throw a dart at a color and an animal chart for their names? Redgorilla.com! Bluegiraffe.com! Anyway, that was good times. This Frog plans to feature over 2 million tracks within the next few months, most notably from Universal Music; the label had famously refused to renew a long-term contract with iTunes over pricing disagreements. SpiralFrog’s business model, such as it is, requires you to click on their ads to keep downloading songs, and they promise “no threat of viruses,” which I totally believe; I mean, why would the intertubes lie to us?
This development comes on the heels of NBC/Universal’s recent decision to jump ship entirely from iTunes and take its video content to Amazon’s new download service, the nearly-as-stupidly-named Unbox. It’s a box, but not a box! Derrrr! Apparently 40% of iTunes movie content was from Universal, and this became all too clear for me recently. I was searching through the iTunes movie section to grab some entertainment for a plane trip, and found slim pickings (sorry, Wild Hogs and Aeon Flux, but I’d rather read the in-flight magazine). NBC’s TV shows will also be exclusive to Amazon’s service, which totally sucks since I watched the whole season of “30 Rock” on my iPod last year, and that’s how I realized that was a good show. Sorry, Tina Fey.
While I’m all for competition, pulling your products from a popular store for spite just seems ridiculous, like, sorry, no orange juice at Safeway, we want to charge you twice as much at Albertson’s. Customers forced to search for their favorite shows will just give up and buy something else, or do what I did and grab a Bittorrent of the Simpsons movie, and feel only slightly guilty during the scene of Bart writing “I will not illegally download this movie” on the blackboard.
