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Spiralfrog is no more
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 20 March 2009
In news that will surprise, well, no one really, SpiralFrog is dead. The once much hyped ad-funded download service went offline yesterday.
It seems the company actually ceased operating last Friday, but the site stayed live for a few days while the firm went through the motions of winding down its affairs. The shutdown follows reports that the service’s founder and chairman Joe Mohen had admitted his investors were about to take direct control of the company.
The Frog’s demise had been expected for some time. In fact, as various high profile execs bailed out of the project before it even launched, there have been rumours that the ad-funded digital music platform was on the verge of closure from almost the word go, the fact they survived as long as they did is probably the bigger surprise. But the prospect of closure became more real a few weeks ago with reports that the company was about to default on some pretty major loan repayments. According to C-Net, the SpiralFrog company officially ceased operations at the end of last week, and its assets have been surrendered to creditors.
For a time the ad-funded model proposed by SpiralFrog was much touted as a key part of the future of the digital music market, and the service claimed to have the support of both the record companies and key advertising agencies. Some said that free ad-funded tracks was a way that the music industry could genuinely take on P2P file sharing, adopting the logic that you can only compete with illegal free services by providing a legal free service.
The concept probably wasn’t completely flawed, but events conspired against the Frog, and another US-based digital music service that went the ad-funded route, the student-targeting Ruckus, which has also closed down. While record companies did support the model, they never made truly extensive catalogues of music available to the services, meaning the choice of tracks available was much less than on paid-for digital music platforms, and less still compared to the illegal P2P file sharing networks.
Then both networks launched just as a-la-carte download platforms were finally removing digital rights management from their file – DRM was very out of fashion, but both the Ruckus and SpiralFrog systems relied on it. Add to that the advertising recession and the growth of user-friendly ad-funded streaming music services like Spotify, and the SpiralFrog and Ruckus offer seemed less and less attractive to consumers, even those who prefer legal to illegal music options.
It does increasingly feel like the digital music market will ultimately divide into two main camps – the ad-funded streaming services and the pay-as-you-go DRM-free download services, with maybe a place for subscription-based all-you-can-eat DRMed download services while the mobile internet is still in its infancy (ie until streaming services are readily available via mobile – Spotify is increasingly talking mobile though, so that may be sooner rather than later). SpiralFrog’s ad-funded downloads don’t really fit into that marketplace.
Though, of course, we shouldn’t assume that the ad-funded streaming services will necessarily be more successful than the ad-funded download platforms, even though there’s more of them and take-up has been higher. The YouTube/PRS squabble shows that making ad-funded streaming music services add up so that artists, songwriters, labels, publishers and stream providers are all happy isn’t as easy as we’d all like. Many of the original providers of music streaming are moving out of that territory, and the maths of Spotify and MySpace Music are not known, so we don’t know whether they will add up long term. Still, the Spotify offer is so much more compelling than anything SpiralFrog ever offered, let’s hope they make it work.
