Longtime readers of this site (that would be Will and John) know that there are consumer products to which we’ve never been very kind. These products include Microsoft’s Zune, anything from DuroSport Electronics and of course SpiralFrog, the major label-sponsored website that allows you to download DRM’d music for FREE! All you have to do is ignore some ads.

After first making fun of the concept, then making fun of the amazingly long time to market, and finally, making fun of the thing itself, I figured that I was done with ever writing about it ever again. Hell, I thought I was done with ever thinking about it again.

Until last night.

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FREE Music!! 25,000,000 Songs! Legal!

Those are the claims of on the current home page of Qtrax, the latest entrant in the downloadable music fray.

All I have to do, of course, is sit through advertising while downloading. Oh, and I also have to download their player in order to play the music I’ve downloaded. OK, so haven’t we already been down this route before with, you know, Spiral Frog?

Well, there is one big difference from Spiral Frog: the fact that right now the major labels are all saying “Qtrax? Who-trax?”

Oops.

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The headlines, of course, are breathless: HBO Goes Online,
It’s not TV, it’s HBO — on your computer, It’s Not the Web, It’s HBO, so when I first saw them, I thought, cool.

Actually, here is what I thought: finally, I’m going to be able to re-watch the full run of The Larry Sanders Show! On my own schedule!

But then I read what HBO on Broadband is actually going to be . . .

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It’s no secret that our favorite music download service at ‘Loper HQ isn’t iTunes, but eMusic. Kirk discussed his reasons last year, and mine are pretty much the same: the wide variety of music, the great pricing, and the fact that I can do whatever I want with the music I’ve downloaded. No damn dirty DRM.

I’m not going to address the breadth and depth of the music itself, but rather the user experience. And to do that, I should very quickly explain how I use eMusic. It’s pretty simple actually: I pay $14.99 per month for 65 downloads (it’s a legacy plan), and every week, I login, go through the new music for that week, and save the things in which I’m interested in my “Saved For Later” page.

That way I don’t use up my downloads at the beginning of the month, and have to wait because something as awesome as The Hold Steady Live At Lollapalooza comes out the day after I used them up. (Of course, I could get a booster pack if that happens, but that’s not maximizing my music dollar.)

After doing it this way for the past couple of years, I’ve noticed some ways that eMusic could improve its user experience. Five ways, as it turns out, and here they are:

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As I pointed out yesterday, this is not a full-fledged scientific breakdown of the iPhone. It’s just some stuff I’ve noticed while using it in my everyday life. Yesterday, I took a look at some larger things about Apple’s iPhone — availability, ease of set-up, and AT&T’s EDGE network.

Today, I’m going to look at some of the other things that I’ve noticed about the iPhone while I’ve been using it for the last week or so.

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The iPhone has been out for a little over a week, and I broke down and purchased one while I was on vacation. And while this is hardly a scientific breakdown of the iPhone — there are zillions of those out there — here are some things I’ve noticed about it in the first week or so of actual everyday use.

• The widely anticipated shortage has not materialized. It looks like if you want an iPhone, you can get one. Check eBay, and you can tell how the people who thought that they would make a Playstation-like killing aren’t doing so hot. Nobody is biting at their “Buy it Now” prices of $900 and above.

  This seems to indicate two things: the demand is not as intense as people though and/or Apple has done a pretty good job in keeping the pipeline open. It’s probably a combination of the two, as illustrated by the story of how I stumbled into purchasing mine in the first place . . .

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[Lopy notes: Spiral Frog finally launched, and we finally reviewed it]

It’s been nearly a year since I first took a look at the concept behind Spiral Frog, the website that offered to give you FREE music as long as you sat through advertising. I didn’t think that it was a concept that I was going to really care for, but I was totally willing to at least give it a shot, since at that time, the site’s launch was going to be by the end of the year. The year being 2006.

However, as I noted at the end of 2006, Spiral Frog pushed back their release date to Q1 2007, so we had to wait a big longer for our FREE music. How much longer, no one really knew, as reports surfaced about problems behind the scenes. At various points, I tried to sign up for previews and emails via their website, but I guess that I’m persona non grata.

Then, something weird happened. At some point in the past couple of months, Spiral Frog has launched, but only a preview. And only in Canada.

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ABC and Cox Cable are trying an experiment in Orange County this fall. They are going to give subscribers of the service the ability to watch some of ABC’s big hit shows — Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives — anytime that they wish. So far, so good.

And, furthermore, they are offering these shows for FREE. Uh-oh. That’s a bit of a red flag. Because we all know that there ain’t no such thing. If you’re not giving money, then you’re giving time.

In this case, FREE means that the on-demand shows have commercials. Which is fair: so did the original broadcasts. But what it also means is that Cox and ABC are disabling the fast-forward button so I can’t zip through the commercials. And that’s where I get off of the bus with this particular idea.

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Throughout the year, we are going to be subjected to various and sundry “YouTube killers”. One such animal is (was?) Bud.tv. Launched with the full faith and credit of the mighty Budweiser empire behind it, the site promised to be an edgy, Bud-oriented alternative to existing online video services.

Since then, numbers have declined from the reported 250,000+ viewers per month to approximately 150,000 viewers. These are not bad numbers, you might think, especially for a new venture. Today’s audience is fragmented enough that these numbers should not the be reason for the Bud.tv to commit the virtual version of hari kari (see: the short-lived Pirate TV or whatever it was called).
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As is my sometimes habit, I ventured out into the real world this week to take the pulse of real people who use real new media. Nobody was paid nor bribed in the course of these discussions and all opinions reflected here represent the opinions of my (anonymous as they shun fame and fortune) focus group, expanded this time to include a few voices from the legal profession.

So here is what they’re saying out there in reality. Remember, real people with real money to spend on goods and services:

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