Universal to Offer Music for Free

wild_berry writes "The BBC reports that Universal Music has signed a deal to make its music available for a free and legally-licensed download. Available from a new music site called SpiralFrog, the deal will allow users in the USA and Canada to listen to Universal's music, which Reuters' news site reveals is paid for by targeted advertising, but no details of possible community or playlist sharing features of the SpiralFrog service. Is the immunity from litigation enough to make up for having targeted advertising on each page and not being able to write the music to CD or a portable player?"

Re:Good News ... but ....

[morgan_greywolf]

You don't like Godsmack? 3 Doors Down?

And Elton John is arguably one of the most popular recording artists ever.

Man, what do you listen to? Barry Manilow?

Lindsay Lohan

[spidereyes]

I can finally download Lindsay Lohan's albums instead of being THAT guy who buys them at the store. Now, if we could only get Hanson to sign with Universal the circle would be complete.

Re:"The big companies"?

[russ1337]

download songs for free and instead rely on advertising for its revenues.

What the article fails to mention is the adverising is the artists singing about a vendors product.....

I cant wait for Elton Johns new single : "Lucy in the sky with diamonds from Jarad"........ [jared.com]

I already have this...

[tillerman35]

It's called an FM radio. I have one in my car, and it downloads music to my brain whenever I drive. Unfortunately, my brain seems to have a problem with the "delete" function. I can't delete that copy of "Hollaback Girl" I downloaded a few months back. Not only that, my mental media player is stuck on repeat right at that part with trombone slide. Someone please help!

Re:Enough ads!

[RobotRunAmok]

What about donations? What about rich people running sites? Ads aren't the only game in town. Look at wikipedia. Look at the BBC even (taxpayer funded).

Man-o-Man, you dance better than Fred Astaire!

And such sterling examples! A Hive-Mind Encyclo-Sandbox in which the most obsessively compulsive disordered player wins, and a Govrnment-sponsored "news" site. If that's what my donations buy me on the web, thanks, but I, um, gave at the office...

For every Wikipedia getting by on donations (and remember, their servers and bandwidth costs are covered by corporate donations, not yours and mine), there's a bajillion sites which simply would not exist were it not for the ad model. You simply cannot create and move rich content without spending far more than the average consumer is willing to pay out-of-pocket.

Which brings us back to your Web-as-Exclusive-Country-Club model.

Good luck with that, Thurston...

Re:Good News ... but ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a list of the universal artists that were from the wiki article, some of them seem to be half way decent, so i'm not sure what the parent is talking about :-)

...Hedley Marques Houston HIM Infinite Mass Elton John Jack Johnson (Brushfire/Universal)...

Apparently, Elton's really let himself go.

Re:Good News ... but ....

[Moofie]

And here I didn't think Bel Biv DeVoe was still recording.