Zaziggy - ad-supported music, terribly invasive

Here’s a free tip to budding entrepreneurs looking to run an online media business: don’t alienate your users before they’ve even joined your service.

I ran across Zaziggy today, another ad-supported music downlod service today in a blog comment on CNET. First impressions: very light on content, all indy artists, looks like they just launched. Their model is to display banners during the download process and split revenues 50/50 with artists. Assuming they can attract quality advertisers and drive a high enough CPM rate, it might not be a bad deal for budding musicians.

Even though there’s only a handful of tracks available, I thought I’d register and download a song or two to get a feel for the experience. So I picked a song from the only artist in Surf Acoustic, Matt Hartke. Here’s where they lost me. Registration requires completion of ~50 fields, including religion, race, physical characteristics and purchase preferences.

Everybody in the media space wants better demographic data on their member base to support higher ad rates. But this is not the way to get it, and it’s unlikely that with such an invasive process that enough community would ever develop to make those stats worthwhile.

Category: Media, Startups || Tags: advertising, Music, Startups, zaziggy ||