RSSHere Lies SpiralFrog (2007-2009)
By Tim Conneally | Published March 20, 2009, 3:04 PM
SpiralFrog, the ad-supported music service launched by Universal Music Group and EMI in 2007, is now defunct.
To say SpiralFrog started off on the wrong foot would be an understatement. The service's launch was delayed by nearly a year due to an internal coup that resulted in the departure of the entire executive team. Then, beta testers reported a very unfriendly system of that commanded the user to authenticate each download within a 60-second span after it was completed, or else the download would be negated. This made the service impossible to use passively.
Further worsening the situation for the company were the combined factors of a contracted advertising market, capital market, and indeed the economy as a whole.
I remember a couple of articles here about it when the initial launch was delayed, but don't remember hearing anything in between then and now.
I presumed it'd died a death before it began.
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|I remember when this came out, I was hoping to be there and finally get a spot on the beta testing team. Goodbye!
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|TheNewGuy beat me to it, but I'll say it anyway. An ad-supported music service that I hear about for the first time only by its obit? I will second his opinion.
As an aside, what's with tech companies these days and the ridiculous-souding (to me, at least) service names? Was it CC that had FireDog? A low-end peripheral manufacturer calling its wares Rocket Fish? SpiralFrog? Then we have, what is it? Boost Mobile, I believe, and the Loopt thing? Reminds me of how it was once thought of as being cool to pluralize words with (shudder) the letter Z.
True, true, one could easily point out the fact that it may be rather difficult to give a service a name that has not already been used, but I maintain my point.
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|Spiral-Whatnow?
Never even heard of this program, but from the sounds of it, I wouldn't use it anyway. Nice way to make a simple service overly complicated.
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|same... who are they?? who cares?? this made news because???
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