news.bbc.co.uk — Universal has signed a deal with Spiralfrog to offer free music downloads to anyone in the US and Canada. The service will launch in December and will be ad-supported. They aim to offer a simple, easy-to-use, free alternative to iTunes.
Aug 29, 2006 View in Crawl 4
zpweeksAug 29, 2006
I like this move, DRM or not.... Free as in beer can be taken with its' advertisements. Last time I checked, people still are happy using Hotmail and Yahoo. Even with text-only ads, Google is making tons......except one thing: the artists. There are already payment controversies with artists on the usual 99-cent-per-song model. Ads are always a tricky business (can you say dot-com bubble?) and I don't like the idea of putting my favorite artists in the middle of it.The music industry is annoying. I don't want studio label suits making tons off of my purchases, but I DEFINITELY want to support the artists themselves. I just see them making even less off of this than they do off pay-per-song or CD sales. The label isn't going to be too worried about controlling its own royalties as long as it gets the advertisement checks.I'd much rather pay my favorite band 10 or 15 bucks directly in exchange for some awesome music.
opethdamnaAug 29, 2006
I really don't expect this project to come anywhere close to having the amount of DRM rights that iTunes has. And if they do, I shudder to think at the amount of ads needed on the page to supoprt it.
travelsonicAug 29, 2006
SpamHater, you are an idiot. Just because somebody breaks DRM doesn't make them a pirate per-se. Your accusation is a false dichotomy and a lie to boot - my dad for example - not a pirate, but breaks DRM just be able to back up his music. "it's the law, it's the law " you may be thinking? Tough s**t, it is immoral to restrict Fair Use past the reasonable bounds originally established.Oh wait, I must now be a pirate because I know that recording using Wave_Out_Mix or Mono_Mix in Audacity while music is playing on the computer, DRM or not, will record a drm-free file that can be saved!No luck!
dwizzle13Aug 29, 2006
ah, free but not worth it. I don't want drmed stuff or having to visit the site more. I'd rather pay and have no drm.
kickcowsAug 30, 2006
having to use the approriate application for it - ie the windows media player, i'm not that interested. yes, i operate on a mac, but so what? i should be able to use what i want for the stuff that i have. by "segregating" the ipod users, this is just a bad idea. when are they going to learn that apple has basically conquered the field in portable music devices? drm or not. and yeah - i can just hear the ads, see the ads on the video service, etc. and by using iTunes, i can still burn cds. bah!