Do You Want Spiral Frog? Get Thee To Canada!
[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.
Um, OK. Why? Don’t get me wrong: Canada is great, but it would seem to me that it might be a smart PR move to explain why. Instead, non-Canadians get this:
You were diverted to this page because we detected that you are not connecting to us from Canada. Unfortunately, at this time, we are only able to preview our service to residents of Canada.
Their website is totally mute on the subject: the Canadian preview isn’t even mentioned in their press releases. Actually, according to their press releases, nothing at all has happened with Spiral Frog for over four months. I’m not an expert or anything, but it seems like a preview launch would merit a press release. As well as links to the positive reviews from the enthusiastic Canadian press.
I sent an email to their press contact last week, but haven’t had a response. While I was never sure if there was a market for Spiral Frog in the first place, as sites like iTunes and Amazon begin offering restriction-free downloads, it looks like the market that Spiral Frog had been conceived for will be in a completely different place if they ever do enter it.
Of course, those of us outside of Canada may never actually find out.
Hey Canadians, what do you think of Spiral Frog??
- Spiral Frog
- Will Spiral Frog Leap Into Our Music Collections?
- Whatever Happened To Spiral Frog?
- Spiral Frog’s Problems Intensify
Technorati Tags: Spiral Frog, Universal Music, Canada
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6 Comment(s) so far
1. Jared wrote on June 20th, 2007 at 7:53 am
First impressions, it uses an active x control, so you have to use IE (they recommend Firefox users use IE Tab rather than IE directly which is a small bonus in their favour, but they make no provision for those using Safari or Opera.) It’s really sad that this day in age that websites are still using Active X, I thought we all agreed that it’s generally a bad idea.
The music downloaded is 128 kbps, it’s using PlayForSure DRM (another huge negative.)
Other than that the site is pretty easy to use and a huge list of music is available.
2. Jared wrote on June 20th, 2007 at 8:04 am
Addendum: On my second attempt to download a song the CAPTCHA you have to enter every time a download finishes (you have 2 minutes to enter it correctly or it will delete the files) didn’t work. I had to download the file file again. Download speeds seemed to be capped at around 10-15k/s it takes about a minute or two to download a 3mb song.
Looksl like it was a bug it was trying to re-download the previous song I already downloaded.
I also found that it puts the temporarly downloaded songs into:
C:\documents and settings\username\Local Settings\Applications\SpiralfrogClient
Even when the CAPTCHA to active the download expires it doesn’t delete the file, but you can’t play it without cracking the DRM.
3. Kirk wrote on June 20th, 2007 at 9:48 am
ActiveX, PlaysForSure, and CAPTCHA?!?! Man, this sounds like some sort of web 1.0 torture device.
4. Lance Davis wrote on July 23rd, 2007 at 11:27 am
The Ad funded model may be the savior to record industry, with with music fans wanting musci for free and artist and labels wanting to get compensated for their works.
5. Jim wrote on July 23rd, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Perhaps, but any model that doesn’t take into consideration that music fans want to do whatever they wish with that music post-possession — i.e., a DRM-less solution — is a non-starter.
6. Leif902 wrote on August 8th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I agree I’d love my music without DRM, but you can’t blame them for doing it. Otherwise everyone would download as much music as they want and rarely ever visit the site again, they would make no money (through advertising) and they would go under. Having DRM is just a way to ensure that music lovers return to the site and view lots of juicy revenue producing adds.
- Leif
http://www.greenmangames.vze.com/