Universal to give their music away for FREE! Upcoming music service SpiralFrog (so new they don't even have a "coming soon" site yet) has apparently got Universal to hop onboard their free music train. This is big news because Universal has the largest catalog of music and they're partnering up with this music startup that is offering FREE music downloads. That's right, free as in beer. How is SprialFrog going to stay in business? Well, the service itself is going to be ad supported. Apparently, they did some reseach on this and found that users wouldn't mind watching some ads in order to get some free content.

I'm intested to see exactly how they're going to structure this. Will it be a video or flash advert that you have to watch before you get into the site or will it be specialized to the point that before you can get to a certain artist's page, you have to watch an ad for their upcoming concert or an ad to buy some of this artist's merchandise. I think the more specialized system would be the way to go but I'm just throwing out guesses at this point. With that being said, a lot of people are going to be watching SpiralFrog closely to see how their business progresses. Me included.  ¶ 9:19 AM