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?"

Comments

What rock have you been under?

[Overzeetop]

You don't need to look online for the free-due-to-advertising model. There have been advertisers giving away free, unrelated product for decades, if not centuries in return for eyeballs. Ever listen to the radio, or watch TV? People are already used to this stuff...the water is already boiling.

Aside: Advertisers are the scourge of the earth, and they may actually rank _below_ lawyers, as at least some lawyers are honest. No, I haven't met one personally, but they supposedly exist whereas there are no honest advertisers almost by definition. Advertisers are at the root of most sports-related inflation. They get owners addicted to the cash like heroin, then claim they need to have more and more exposure to geep that cash coming. as the money filters down, everybody gets greedy, and you end up with $8 beers, $5 hot dogs, $300 bleacher seats, and some guy who can't even spell his name making $80M over 4 years right out of college because he can run a 4.2 40 and throw a pigskin 80 yards.

[OT] Audacity

[morgan_greywolf]

Just started fiddling with Audacity this weekend....me likey!

Audacity is very cool app. The editing interface is very easy to work with and highly intuitive, you can change pitch and speed of a recording, and you can even add cool audio effects, with the ability to add your own. And it's cross-platform, with ports for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. And, of course it's open source. ;)

I originally installed it in order to convert/edit some tape recordings I had and 'master' them to CD-Rs, and then I just started playing with it, mixing up some tracks and stuff. All in all, a very powerful tool for audio editing!