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?

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: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: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.