SpiralFrog: Free Music Alive And Hopping

Remember SpiralFrog that free music download service that announced itself nearly a year ago? Well, after slowly releasing invites to Canadians, we received a private beta invitation.

SpiralFrog originally made a splash when they sealed a deal with Universal BMG to give away free downloads of some of their songs in exchange for a share of on-site ad revenue. Later they closed a deal with EMI and have since added a bunch of smaller labels totaling over 700,000 songs. However, now we know a little more about how their free system works.

Songs on SpiralFrog are not ad-supported through interstitial advertising or free in the sense that you can bring them anywhere. Instead, you get DRMed songs (WMA) leased to you for a free 30 day membership (or you can buy on Amazon). You can renew your membership, and the lease to play your songs, by answering survey questions (# concerts per year, how you discover music, etc). All that data helps SpiralFrog know what kind of ads to serve on the site.

To keep the whole system secure, they’ve locked down the download process end to end DRM controls. First you have to get a download manager, and then ensure you have Windows Media Player 9.0 or up. The system is kind of annoying and only works on Windows machines since it uses Microsoft DRM. Although, Microsoft DRM has already been cracked. The DRM requirement also means the songs only play through Windows Media Player, making them unportable. Unlike other DRM setups, though, there doesn’t appear to be a limit to the number of computers you can download to as long as you set SpiralFrog up on them.

Once the system is in place, you can search for artists and download their songs/videos individually. The songs are queued in a download manager and stored locally by artist and album in your SpiralFrog folder. The system seems to have intentionally been crippled so you view more advertising, with downloads happening one at a time and only while on the site. Using the site, I was able to download a bunch of songs and play them with no problem, but other early beta user have had trouble.

I don’t know if SpiralFrog will be able to sustain their business off of on-site advertising and affiliate music sales. A lot of other services are simply going DRM free, not download free. Blogmusik also recently went legit in France, but the US courts and music industry are a lot harder to sway. However, limiting the lease time on the songs means they can continuously tweak what hoops their users need to hop through to keep playing the music they download. For now it may be a simple option if you want a (legal) source of free tunes.

Own Your Own English Soccer Team: MyFootballClub

UK based MyFootballClub is aiming to take the power of collaborative social membership to the world of English soccer by purchasing a professional English soccer team using user contributions.

The site launched in April and had over $500,000 in contributions within its first 24 hours.

The legal side is fairly simple. Contributors become members of the MyFootballClub Trust for £35 ($69). £27.50 goes towards purchasing a soccer club, buying new players and other club expenditure with the remaining £7.50 going towards administration. The Trust will acquire a soccer club only on the basis that the purchase provides a controlling stake (51%+) of the club and where the club is either debt free or has a manageable level of debt.

Members are then said to have “an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club.”

MyFootballClub aims to buy a mid-tier English soccer club with an aim of building the club into a future Premier Division side.

At the time of writing MyFootballClub had over 53,000 members and had taken more than £1.375 million ($2.73 million) in member subscriptions. The site is currently in negotiations with four prospective acquisition targets.

Sell Your Digital Wares Through Edgeio Paid Content

Classified listing service Edgeio now lets you sell content through your listings. The new type of listing called “Paid content” consists of the same listing Edgeio already hosts, but comes with an embedded digital locker. Through the locker, users can securely sell text, file downloads, and streaming media through a widget hosted by Edgeio.

It seems a good fit for selling podcasts or research reports. Affiliates can also grab the widget code to sell your product on their own sites as well for a revenue share determined by the content owner. Michael Arrington, the editor of this blog, is a founder and investor in the company.

Digital lockers are nothing new. E-Junkie, Payloadz, Tradebit, and Bitpass (shutdown) have done it for a while. However, Edgeio has the added advantage of leveraging the paid listings through their existing listings network and providing a very straightforward product.

It’s pretty simple to get started. You sign up to create a listing like any other through the “Paid Content” link. Next, select your content type, price (currency), affiliate percentage, and coupon code. Finally, Edgeio lets you make a teaser “preview” for the content to give buyers an idea about what they’re purchasing. Once completed, you get some embed code and the listing is placed in Edgeio’s index, linked to the page where the widget is embedded.

An example of one of the widget embeds is included below. The other version of the widget initially shows visitors a teaser, until the content is purchased and unlocked. Use the coupon code “vgforfree” to unlock the content. To purchase the content, you need to sign into your Edgeio account and to pay by credit card or PayPal. The content is then unlocked for your Edgeio account.

Edgeio splits revenue from sales through the widget 80/20 in favor of the content creator. The creator can then split that 80% for sales through affiliates at any percentage they like.

Update (Arrington): This is a company that I co-founded in early 2005 with Keith Teare, months before I started TechCrunch. There is a clear conflict of interest, although I did not write, edit or give input on this post. For a balance of viewpoints, see Techmeme.

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