It is look more and more unlikely that the idea of supporting the distribution of music through advertising sales, is not going to fly after all. Innovator Spiralfrog, which signed up the Universal Music catalog back in August has kicked out its CEO and is having trouble getting enough music to launch with.
CNET announced that a further five executives were also fired and some board members departed over issues of just how the company should proceed.
Joe Mohen, founder of SpiralFrog, seems to have re-taken the reins and has just appointed Jordan Levin as a director, who was the former CEO of the Warner Brothers television network.
Since its launch Spiralfrog has managed to get EMI on board, but Warner Music and Sony-BMG have held out against the plan, leaving it unsure of just when the service can be launched.
The four labels between them speak for the bulk of music sold in the US, Europe and large parts of Asia Pacific, despite the fact that thousands of independent record labels exist.
The company says that rights and compensation issues are still not set in stone, and it has had trouble proving that such a market exists. The closest to it is advertising supported US radio stations, which are in a bit of a decline of late, challenged by both portable media players and the ad free subscription based satellite radio.
The company says in press releases that more label deals and a service launch are both imminent.
The idea appears to be that advertising, including some video advertising, is just in the background as the consumer selects and downloads tracks and once the download is complete the music can be played as often as the customer wishes, until they return to the site. Periodic returns must happen to renew their licenses, so the idea is to create a regular site browsing habit.
Other services have offered up the idea that advertising should be forced on the consumer and it has to be sat through, and the user must prove that he or she has sat through it before being allowed to download free content. This model is more prevalent in the higher value download market for video, and is currently in experiment at a number of film downloading services.