SpiralFrog Reaches 3 Million Songs
Is the weak economy a good or bad thing for ad-supported music?
Free ad-supported music download service SpiralFrog is now offering more than three million songs – four times the amount offered a year ago at launch. Music videos for download also increased to almost 5000 and registered users have grown to 2.3 million according to the company. SprialFrog believes this is the largest total number of registered users on any legal, free music download site, but offered no details as to how active the users are.
According to Joe Mohen, founder and chairman, "With the current economic turmoil and the potential threat of a recession looming, the offering of free music is very attractive to budget conscious consumers." SpiralFrog’s biggest competion isn’t paid downloads, however, it’s free pirated mp3’s via P2P. It is also unclear how the economic downturn will effect the advertising revenue that all ad-supported sites require.
IMO, asking users to install a download manager is the top way to prevent widespread adoption of a service. If I installed every ‘download manager’ I needed to try out the sites I wanted to try, it would be (ha) unmanageable. As soon as I’m asked to install new software to listen to music, I leave.