There's something illustrative in the sad story of SpiralFrog. The misnamed and misbegotten service came with a tantalizing premise: free, unlimited, advertising-supported music downloads – no catch! SpiralFrog finally materialized last week, launched with the significant support of Universal Music. It's one of those intensely anticipated, ballyhooed websites that you've probably never heard of. I can assure you, however, that professionals in the anticipation-and-ballyhooery business (always a growth sector) have been on it for months.
Alas, the music service that promised no catches turned out to be nothing but catches. Yes, you can download an unlimited quantity of music for free, but a lot depends on how you understand the word “download.” You might have understood that downloading implies pulling something off the Internet, having it in your hot little hands and being able to use it as you please. How quaint.
Even though SpiralFrog does let you pull music onto your own computer, it comes in a special Microsoft format that has all kinds of booby traps built in. Apple's iTunes files are similarly protected, but they aren't nearly so in-your-face about it. For one thing, SpiralFrog threatens to revoke your ability to listen to the music you've downloaded unless you visit the SpiralFrog website at least once a month, ogle their advertising and do a little dance to renew your membership. Right now, the dance involves filling out a four-page customer-satisfaction questionnaire; my own answers got more and more disgruntled with each successive page I had to fill in.
Even if you stay in the service's good books, there's only so much you can do with this music. SpiralFrog assures us that you can transfer the files to portable music players except, ahem, for the portable music players that make up most of the market. That means no iPods, nor – even more bizarrely – the iPod's distant-second competitor, Microsoft's own Zune player. (That's right: Microsoft has two different formats for crippling music and they don't talk to each other.) You can forget about burning your music on a CD, and Mac users are left high and dry too.
So what you have is a service that lets you grab as much music as you want, but it probably won't play on your portable device, just your computer, and only if it's the right kind of computer, and only as long as you keep going to SpiralFrog's oppressively green website in perpetuity. It's like being given a free all-you-can-eat buffet on the condition that you never leave the restaurant.
SpiralFrog's inauspicious launch has since been overshadowed by a more promising piece of news: Amazon.com, the online bookseller whose offerings have become so eclectic it's starting to resemble a rural general store, has finally jumped into the online music arena.
Amazon is taking the exact opposite approach to SpiralFrog: it's selling tracks from $0.89, and once you buy them, the little blighters are yours to do with as you please. There are no restrictions on putting them on players, or burning CDs, or even making copies of them. No technological barrier prevents Amazon buyers from breaking the law; only the law prevents buyers from breaking the law.
You'll be hearing a lot more about Amazon in the months to come, if only because restriction-free music is a subject that's near and dear to the licensed practitioners of anticipating and ballyhooing. Music files that are crippled to restrict what buyers can do with them are bogeymen to the technorati technolati. However, the runaway success of Apple's iTunes store – where the music is also crippled to prevent copying – tells me that the general public doesn't mind as long as it's not too much hassle and it doesn't interfere with their interpretation concept of what's theirs.
This is where SpiralFrog goes awry. It loses marks for being – as we say in the industry – incredibly annoying to use. But SpiralFrog's cardinal sin is that it reminds its customers, loud and clear, that their music doesn't really belong to them. Threatening to yank back the music they've downloaded doesn't just makes users uneasy about investing the time to download the stuff in the first place; it tells them not to get comfortable, since the music isn't theirs to begin with.
That's a complete non-starter. People in these parts can't relate to music as anything other than a quasi-mystical personal experience, and it's not just because it keeps getting sold to us that way.
Music is ambiguous and cryptic. It requires decoding and interpretation, unless you're listening to Raffi. (And even then.) It draws the listener into taking an active role in its creation. This is true of any form of expression, I know, but with music, we get downright fetishistic about it. Listener response – what does this song mean to you? – is everything.
It doesn't pay for a music company to make users feel anything less than intimately bonded to their personal collections. Apple's music might be locked to serve corporate interest, but its marketing arm plays up the sacred connection between individuals and their mass-distributed music at every turn.
At this rate, SpiralFrog will be off the radar in no time, left to join the ranks of also-ran subscription services like the sad-sack reincarnation of Napster. It's hard to imagine many people opting to maroon themselves on SpiralFrog's lily pad: When it comes to music, ownership is more important than price.
