Dave Haynes

Looks like the much potentially groundbreaking, yet much over-hyped SpiralFrog ad-funded download store could be on quite a spiral downwards as the company appears to be burning cash at an astonishing rate. Its been reported that Spiral Frog face Q3 losses of $3.4 Million and is now looking to raise a further $25 million. Meanwhile in the same period it has only generated revenue of $20,400.

Although amazed at the vast sums of money being spent i find the low revenues perhaps the most astonishing. Many small specialist download stores and independent labels are capable of generating similar revenues and they probably wouldn’t even know how to spent $340,000 in one quarter let alone $3.4 million. How they think another $25 million is going to help a bad idea turn into a good idea i’m not sure?

That’s not to say free or ad-funded music won’t be a valid business model in the very near future, but it does seem as though SpiralFrog have missed the mark a little here. Apparently their plan to turn things around is to

“Execute marketing campaign in the United States aimed at 13-34 year olds, through one or more of the following approaches: hire gorilla (sic) marketing firms for unconventional promotions; consumer targeted press releases; advertising on some of the youth community sites; or hiring ‘bloggers’ to attract attention to us on the internet.”

I wonder how much someone got paid to come up with that?! Gorilla marketing!!!

I’ve tried twice before to sign on to Spiral Frog, and i thought i’d try once more in my lunch break while i write this. All i can report is a wholly unsatisfactory experience and i can see how SpiralFrog reportedly only have 96,000 users (quite a few short of their goal of 3 million). I was presented with 3 hurdles.

1) The service was only available in US & Canada (presumably as they only have licenses in place for these territories
2) After I’d overcome this (don’t ask me how) I then had to register, giving up details including my d.o.b. (most of which I had to falsify as I didn’t want to give up private information).

3) Then I had to confirm my email address. Which had been marked as junk and potentially harmful.

4) Once i’d confirmed my email address I was then asked to download and install the Spiralfrog Download Manager. And because i was using Firefox was also asked to download an additional plugin for the browser.

At this point i decided to give up, i already have the Rhapsody client, Napster client, Last.FM client, Emusic Remote, Songbird, iTunes & Windows Media player hogging my desktop so i really didn’t want to have to install any more software. In fact I think i’d rather just pay for my music on one of the stores I already use than have to exert more energy to get access to free music. And that’s even before i get bombarded with ads and consumer surveys from SpiralFrog.

This is one Frog that doesn’t have legs.