World's largest music company Vivendi Universal agrees to free music downloads

[mandy]

Vivendi Universal, the world's biggest music group, has signed a deal to make its music catalogue available on a free legal downloads service.

Under the agreement, Spiralfrog will offer Universal's songs online in the US and Canada.

New York-based Spiralfrog will launch its service in December and make its money by carrying adverts on the site.

Spiralfrog aims to take on market leader Apple's iTunes service, which charges 99 cents per song in the US...

full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5294842.stm

[mandy]

One year later SpiralFrog finally launches:

The free music download site SpiralFrog.com has finally croaked its first notes. The company's online launch has been in the works since August of last year, and the company missed its well-publicized December 2006/early 2007 launch plans, apparently due to executive shakeups. Today, however, end users can download more than 800,000 songs and videos.

The music industry has taken another stab at the question of making profit from online music, this time in the form of a site called "SpiralFrog." The site offers free music, but it's loaded with DRM, which keeps the user from loading the songs onto an iPod. It also uses time the user spends downloading to do a little marketing...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/ImXvQ5aS...oads.xhtml