Petteri Pyyny
29 Aug 2006 4:23
World's largest record label, Vivendi's Universal Music has signed a deal with an upstart music download company SpiralFrog that allows consumers to download Universal's music for free.
SpiralFrog's business model is based on advertising revenue rather than charging for downloads. With Universal's music catalog available to the service, the company seems to be poised to challenge Apple's dominant position in legal music downloads. And, most of all, Universal is putting its hopes that by providing their music for free -- even with the ads -- would reduce the number of people using P2P networks to download music illegally.
Very little details about the service are revealed so far, and huge question marks loom over the service and its features. It is not known whether the service will allow user to really download the songs to their own computers where they could be transferred to portable audio players, or whether the songs need to be played using a specific web application or software.
According to SpiralFrog's website, the service should launch in December, 2006.
Source: FT