A very bad frog

The newest in the War on Freedom to listen to music as you chose is apparently SpiralFrog. It's a "digital entertainment destination!"

Apparently the way it will work is this: it's an ad-supported site offering free music downloads. The theory, I suppose, is that they'll make enough money from adspace to repay the music labels. I'm doubtful that that'll work regardless of whatever terms the set out, but okay, it could be viable.

There will, of course, be DRM nonsense. Apparently we've fallen into a sort of binary system: Either your music/movies/etc are legal but not free for you to use as you wish, or they're illegal but you can use them without limits.

Anyway, this paragraph from their first press release interests me:

Digital rights management technology is built-in to all audio and video content as part of measures the company and its partners are actively taking to address piracy. "We want to provide the best environment for everyone - our partners and the recording artists, as well as consumers," Kent said. "Piracy continues to be one of the biggest issues facing the music industry where illegal file sharing and unauthorized CD burning are the prime means of music piracy. Digital rights protection will help us combat piracy and provide peace of mind for the record labels and the artists."

Take a closer look at this:

"We want to provide the best environment for everyone - our partners and the recording artists, as well as consumers,"

Here's a hint: If you want to be successful in a consumer business, put your consumers first. The world is full of bad examples of this, where the stockholders and corporate executives are who the business is really looking after, and the customers that actually produce the profit are an afterthought. If you tell people that they're effectively an afterthought, and then ask them to give you money, it may not be that successful.