EMI, Universal ink pacts with free tunes startup Two major music labels have signed partnerships with a new ad-supported music startup called FreeAllMusic.com, which lets US users download free (and legal) songs in exchange for watching video commercials. One week after Universal Music Group inked a deal to license its music, FreeAllMusic announced that EMI is on board with …
Spotify are making a profit? Are you sure about that?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/spotify_exclusive/
"just 14p of advertising revenue per user - not enough to keep the lights on"
If you can't keep the lights on then you aren't making a profit. Their figures may have improved since then but it's a long way from 14p per user to a sustainable profit.
I run an add free music site at www.crackpots.org.uk promoting unsigned UK bands and musicians. It's all DRM free and we don't talk about profit.
Sorry the site may not be available at all times, (the cost of running on shoe strings), but hopefully as time goes by this unavailability will not be a problem.
Regards
ALF
They tried it with DVD, but that's easily beaten with a slight extra outlay on an import disc and a quick web-hunt for your player's unlock code. As even I have done with some hard-to-find-in-the-UK titles.
And before that in a more ad hoc manner with physical record distribution; you'd actually be less likely to know about it anyway back then, but if you were clued in enough you could have a chat with your local friendly record shop who could have a go at arranging for an import copy from the region in question, if they didn't in fact already have a couple copies in stock.
This way blocks you from being able to get hold of the material at all - at least, by any LEGAL means.
(Well, ok, a bit harsh - stops you getting it *for free* by legal means, understandable because a lot of advertisers may be selling things that just don't appear in your local market area; and it's not like it's a world first - Youtube and Hulu are buggers for it already and I hit the location-wall on an almost daily basis*. But it's but a short hop to exercising that sort of IP-filtering power for paid content as well)
* but somehow i just can't be arsed delving into the murky world of proxies that I can HTTP-tunnel into from work just to get hold of some funny cartoon network clip that they've decided is Too Hot For Britain or whatever. In C21, there's always something else.
1. What if they come in on the same port as the tunes, or thru some download app?
2. Could be they check to make sure you've received the video before the music will come in. Both sides of the deal are small and short enough to make that kind of monitoring and queuing practical.
3. You could hit mute and stick the window/tab in the background until it's run thru. So long as you don't have to do one of these captcha-esque things where it asks you to hit a certain button in response to a question proving that you've watched it. Seen similar on webcomic voting sites, even, so no reason a commercial (in the most literal sense, now!) site can't employ the method.
Really the potential "problem" with this lies in how long and annoying the ads are, if it's one (or more) per song or just one per monthly allocation, and the quality of the files. Could be you watch the equivalent of a freeview ad break, and then get two typical albums' worth of 256kbit MP3 for your trouble. I could happily go for that, given that the current-media alternative is a couple of reheated episodes of Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
Or more relevantly, the endlessly repeated glurge of a commercial radio station - I swear Heart FM gets thru less than 20 new tracks per month (and tons and tons of ads), if it even manages to cram that much "todays best music variety" across a whole 24 hour broadcast period...
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