Wise Startup Blog

Taken from an article by Red Herring

“We have controlled content in an advertiser-friendly environment,” said Spiralfrog founder and Chairman Joe Mohen, who appointed a new management team earlier this year after losing two senior executives, who are now consultants to Qtrax. “People were discovering music in one place and then downloading it somewhere else. Spiralfrog will change that.”

Spiralfrog and Qtrax are not the first to support free and legal downloads with advertising. Ruckus Network Inc of Herndon, Virginia has been offering a similar service for three years and is now officially at 170 U.S. colleges and claims 700,000 members.

A big problem for these free download services is that they are incompatible with the most popular digital music player, Apple’s iPod.

A big problem with these new services is they do not match the value of Limewire nor do they attempt to exceed that value.

These services must do the following:

1. Offer the same catalog as Limewire, otherwise, it’s like shopping at Soap store for soap, the potato chip store for chips, and the mop store for mops. The services must be the Wal-mart offering one-stop shopping. Consumers have less time than ever, so make it easy on them, and maybe they’ll pay you for the convenience !

2. Provide DRM-free files so consumers can do what they want with their files. Just because they have no restrictions doesn’t mean everyone in the world is going to put them on the Internet for pirates, hell, any content you want to find is already on the Internet for free, it’s just a matter of technical ability and the time to find it.

3. Provide some value — what about recommending music to consumers, allowing them to download the songs to their phones, letting them access their libraries from any computer. There are a ton of innovative ways to expand the offering beyond this crap, wake up !

People pay for satellite radio, people pay $100 for cable TV, people WILL pay for music if it has the same inherent value and quality as all of these free services out there (radio, analog tv, etc.)