Universal Offers iPod-Resistant Music

dprovine writes "Universal is now offering music through Spiral Frog as free downloads supported by advertising revenue. But according to Daily Tech, the files being offered won't work on iPods. 'The move to not allow its content to be played on iPod's appears to be a clear snub by the Universal Music Group, similar to NBC's recent move of its television content from iTunes to Amazon.com. Apple has not commented on this development. For many, though, SpiralFrog.com presents an intriguing new business model that may present a legal alternative to file sharing or spending large amounts of money on CDs or paid download services, such as iTunes.'"

Comments

United States of America and Canada only

[cerberusss]

Our Apologies. At this time, the SpiralFrog Web site is available only to residents of the United States of America and Canada.

No problem guys, apologies accepted! I know some Russian sites that happily cater to the western European crowd :-)

"iPod's"

[Anonymous Coward]

The move to not allow its content to be played on iPod's appears to be a clear snub by the Universal Music Group

Played on iPod's what?

Re:"iPod's"

[Anonymous Coward]

'Seriou'sly people, the apo'strophe i's not there to 'say "look out, an ''s' i's coming! Run for the hill's!"

Won't play on Zune either...

[antifoidulus]

since it seems to support "Plays for Sure" which doesn't play for sure on a Zune.....

Re:Won't play on Zune either...

[syrinx]

Well, guess we'd better find both Zune owners and give them the bad news.

Re:Won't play on Zune either...

[IronChef]

I am imagining Zoidberg with a brown Zune in one claw and a sad look on his face.

Re:Uh.... what's the big deal?

[Fred_A]

I think you need to brush up on the difference between lossy and lossless encoders. Presto, your music would sound like crap after being compressed 4 times with different compressors. Just download crap music and you won't be able to tell the difference anyway. Problem solved.

I agree, except

[Anonymous Coward]

substitute "cork" for "cock" and it would be an apt analogy. Better to know who is screwing you.

Not buying from advertiser is stealing music?

[kanweg]

So, what is next? Not buying from advertisers is stealing music?

Bert

Re:That long?

[KingSkippus]

Whoops, editors screwed up. They're not MP3s, they're WMAs. I take it back.

(Money's now on 72 or so hours. Not for lack of technical know-how, but for sheer apathy.)

Even better business model

[PPH]

I'm going to release content that won't play on ANY platform and grab their market share.

So there!!!

Re:Ears alone would be good enough

[veganboyjosh]

Just so we're clear, the record industry peeps have no ears, and their fingers are in their ears, while their heads are up their asses, all the while humming a tune that's to a different drummer, AND screaming "mine mine mine!"?

Talented folks, these deformed **ia people...

Re:Where Apple is NOT competing

[stewbacca]

My theory is that Apple is a cool company that cares about cool things, like music and digital video editing. Microsoft cares about uncool things, like spreadsheets and registry editing.

Re:Now music comes with a ball and chain! Yay!

[GPL Apostate]

Yes, but any iPod enthusiast will tell you that it's a very gentle DRM. You can burn it to a CD, then rip the CD to a .wav file, and play the .wav file back through an old 8-bit sound blaster card on a Windows 3.1 system to the line input on a cassette deck. Then play the cassette back into your Mac II's sound input to record an .aiff file and from there encode it to MP3. Alternatively, if your SparcStation 10 is one of the rare ones with the sound options, you can record to .au instead.

Re:WMA /= MP3

[Delkster]

You're completely right, but I'm still a little baffled -- what do you get when you divide WMA by MP3 and then re-assign the result to WMA? ;-)

Re:Simple DVDs good

[Hijacked Public]

Having to wait for the menu video intro to play and then shift the cursor around to "play" every time I stick the disk in is not as convenient Yeah, you're telling me.

The average movie is what, 2 hours or so? Figure if you went on a movie watching marathon you'd have to do this inconvenient cursor shuffling 12 times a day. That would have to be like 30, maybe as many as 40, remote button presses in a day. How on earth 'they' expect the average consumer to put up with that level of atrocity is beyond me.

That is not even considering the wear and tear such a thing would put on my fingertips. And how much life it takes off my AAA batteries.