Zaziggy - ad-supported music, terribly invasive

Published by Eric Litman on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 8:07am

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 ...

SpiralFrog launch delayed, management shakeup

Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 2:32pm

Ad-supported music download service SpiralFrog fired its CEO, ex Universal McCann CEO Robin Kent, and possibly other management team members this week, according to a research note published by Music Ally. In the memo sent to clients, Music Ally also noted that the originally planned December launch has been delayed until some time in the first half of 2007. SpiralFrog made waves in the digital music space last August when it announced it would provide consumers with free downloads of tracks laden with heavy digital rights management restrictions from several major labels and publishers.