SpiralFrog

Wow – another new take on a model for content distribution!
We’ve watched Napster, KaZaA, Limewire, iTunes, YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video and the rest work up experiments in the emerging ways video and audio (formerly hard copy formats in DVD and CD) and changing user expectations about immediacy, cost and copyright.
Anyway, SpiralFrog is launching this year – probably December to take advantage of all those new Xmas iPods and laptops. It has free (yes free) music from Universal (largest music company in the world) and EMI is probably up next along with others. Its innovation is that the music is free and legal. There’s DRM but you have to keep using the site to keep your listening rights. It’s ad supported.
Read more here, and here and here.
I see some mashup potential here for libraries (or at least their users). Is this the beginning of user acceptable DRM? Try it for free and get used to it before we monetize it…? Is this an applicable model for digitized books? What if the four largest book publishers started playing ths way? What if they did it through Google BookSearch and offered rentals without ads and free with? Hmmmm. Not too far fetched.
Stephen