The idea of free music usually sends fear into the ponytailed, Wayfarer and jeans and jacket-wearing hearts of the music industry, but it looks like EMI are going to make an exception with Spiralfrog.
EMI has just signed up its roster for the new free legal music downloads service Spiralfrog, meaning that fans will be soon be able to download songs by folks like Eminem and Arctic Monkeys without a) helping to buy Steve Jobs a brand new diamond-encrusted space submarine or b) funding Russian terrorism by illegally downloading like that bloke tells you happens every year at the Grammys.
Throughout history, there have been many ways to get free music, be it holding a tape recorder up to the TV when Top Of The Pops is on, burning CDs off your friends or illegal file-sharing. Or following an ice cream van around on a bike for a week until the thrill of hearing a constant rinky-dink version the Match Of The Day theme-tune wears off. We won't be doing that again in a hurry.
However, all of these methods are illegal. In fact, it's a little-known truth that every time you download a copy of a Kanye West b-side from a bored teenager in Middlesex on Kazaa, al-Qaeda gets given a new bomb. So what are you to do? Well, up until now you've had to pay – either from Napster or iTunes or another download service, or actually walk to a shop and pay a fiver for whatever's in the HMV sale. And this is the 21st century! Nobody walks any more! But soon there'll be a new, free, legal downloads service called Spiralfrog, and it looks like it means business – EMI has just signed its artists up for Spiralfrog, as BBC News reports:
EMI Music Publishing has become the latest firm to sign a deal to make its music catalogue available on a free legal downloads service. Under the deal, online music service Spiralfrog will offer work from EMI's artists – which include the Arctic Monkeys and Eminem – online in the US. New York-based Spiralfrog will launch its service in December and make its money by carrying adverts on the site. It will rival Apple's iTunes, which charges 99 cents per song in the US. Last week Vivendi Universal agreed to make its music catalogue available through Spiralfrog.
And Roger Faxton of EMI Music Publishing seems to think that Spiralfrog has just saved his ass, too:
"We are very pleased to help launch Spiralfrog. It is a very exciting concept which fuses advertising with music downloads and other services to recapture consumer demand which has been hijacked by online piracy. Anytime we can create a new revenue stream for our songwriters and combat online piracy, you will see EMI Music Publishing leading the charge."
Of course, there are downsides to all this whole Spiralfrog thing – there's no way on Earth that Apple will let you play Spiralfrog-downloaded songs on your iPod – and certainy not your twatty iPod jeans – and there's a good chance that the songs you download from Spiralfrog will actually be cover versions performed by amputee orphans and alcoholic tramps with only a saucepan and a wooden spoon for instrumentation. Unless we dreamed that last bit. Anyway, you can see just how good EMI songs sound on Spiralfrog at the end of the year when it launches.
Read more:
EMI Publishing In Downloads Deal – BBC
[story by Stuart Heritage]
