SpiralFrog Exceeding Our Lack Of Expectations
Nick Gonzalez
18 comments »
SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls.
While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage.
The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM.
However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well.
I am still surprised that iTunes is still dominating the marketplace in the face of these guys and others… I look forward to seeing how all this works out in the next few years.
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
SF is lying about their uniques… imo. Anyhooz, I agree Jon. It’s amazing what an early lead and good branding will do for you. (Also see: XBOX) I give full props to JobsCo. but it’s time for their consumer driven monopoly to end now. *raises fist in the air dramatically* Damn. I just realized I’m out of cheetos. I’ll finish this revolt later.
Wait, they announced they had 1 million uniques or did this number come from comscore? What does compete or alexa say?
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....alfrog.com
Pathetic.
lawlz. Even though Alexa’s #s are skewed off the toolbar searches, that is dang funny.
I wish I had a Comscore account.
People need to stop talking about iTunes ‘killers’ and just shoot the damn gun.
I’m not sure I believe their claim of 1.2 million uniques, but even if it is true you’re comparing it against imeem’s user base in the US only - according to alexa (insert disclaimer about accuracy of alexa) imeem is only getting 20% of their users from the US, so their real monthly uniques are more like 15million.
I don’t think users outside the US can use spiralfrog right?
One of the nice things about imeem is their worldwide user base brings all sorts of music to the table - ever heard of Kuduru? It’s a Nigerian cross between techno and booty-bass - try finding any of that on iTunes, Napster or Spiralfrog
Yes! Yes! Let there be more competition.The end winners are going to be us!
http://technoq.blogspot.com
in december, imeem had over 20 million unique visitors. that’s up from 19 million in november, and 18 million in october. so spiralfrog have a long road ahead.
Its hilarious when people complain about sites that are offering music for free. whats the problem if spiralfrog did reach 1.2 mil uniques this month? good for them. go stream your music from imeem, you ingrates.
For those speaking french a good analysis between last.fm supposed earnings and a modest indie selling platform for an unsigned artist:
http://www.corvaisier.fr/2008/.....le-lastfm/
First off, Imeem launched in 2004 - so i t took 4 yrs for them to reach thier numbers. Why complain about SpiralFrog? I know lots of people who use it - it is a heck of a lot easier to use than other sites. I have said this before - iTunes is the leader now because they had the first model. Who cares about iPods - the players are trending to be like cell phones. They are all cool and all work. Things are changing…..
I didn’t think they’d last this long. I think its a bad model.
http://www.chartvote.com is a music discover service thats said to be launching this year. I haven’t heard much else about it yet though.
Wonder if Qtrax which is due to launch next Sunday will steal some of Sprialfrogs thunder .
Former Spiral Frog Execs , notably Robin Kent the former CEO of Spiral Frog , now work for Qtrax .
http://www.qtrax.com/
‘iTunes is the leader now because they had the first model.’
Correction: iTunes borrowed their model from a load of Dotcom 1.0 companies like emusic, musicbank, myplay and even napster - they all pitched the idea of pay per download in the late 90’s but none of them could secure any deals with the major lables. They were just there at the right time (when they realised that shutting down every filesharing system was impossible) and with enough business clout to make the deals that made them viable. Apple has done a lot of innovative things but the iTunes music store wasn’t one of them.
Spiralfrog looks interesting but I’ve never been able to get the site to work - nothing using windows DRM works on my system, I think windows is paranoid about some of my development tools.
imeem works just fine for me
Um,
Streaming music? Isn’t youtube just good enough for that? I guess big labels will do all they can for now.
This sure will bring some legal crows from the music business.
Everything I search for on SpiralFrog… they don’t have.
‘Streaming music? Isn’t youtube just good enough for that?’
Sure you can share your mp3 via youtube
1) Take your mp3
2) Take an image
3) combine both into a ‘movie’ with the mp3 as soundtrack
4) upload to youtube.com
Then everyone can…
5) bask in the glorious 64kbit lo-fi audio delivered by youtube
6) get annoyed when the record label takes it down
or you could
1) Upload the mp3 to imeem.com
Then everyone can….
2) Listen to it, at CD quality