NolinLeChasseur.com
business-to-business marketing strategy, and other stuff
- “SpiralFrog is targeting iTunes customers.” iTunes customers (just like Napster customers, PureTracks customers, Bonfire customers, and Fill-in-the-blank customers) are already willing to pay for music. They don’t want free downloads with frustrating usage restrictions. They want to pay a fair price for downloads that they can use how they want to use them. At home, in the car, or on their mobile device.
- “SpiralFrog is targeting free downloaders.” Freeloaders don’t want to become compliant. They don’t want to help the major labels make their money. They like getting stuff for free. They download MP3’s that have NO DRM restrictions. They have no interest in watching minutes and minutes of advertising in exchange for what they already get much easier and faster. When will the industry finally admit that there always have been, and always will be, freeloaders and stop trying (and failing) to monetize them?
- “SpiralFrog is targeting young downloaders.” The youth market have been against mainstream advertising tactics from the first day they learned to type “www-dot”. Not only do they avoid the influence of banners, search ads, and email blasts; they go out of their way to block and avoid them. That’s why there is so much innovation in the areas of online product placement, brand integration, social networking referrals, and other more credible sources of marketing messages. Strapping a 16 year old to her desk chair and inundating her with a 90-second video for tampons or cheeseburgers or pencil crayons will never be effective.
- “SpiralFrog will offer a user experience better than P2P download sources.” Have the executive team at SpiralFrog tried the latest versions of iTunes, Napster, Azureus, uTorrent, and Limewire? Have they seen how short the release cycles are? And even if the answer to all of these is a resounding yes and they’ve doctored up their GUI with some nifty AJAX widgets, have they really honestly determined that a marginally better mousetrap is going to drive switching and generate more revenue in their business model? I find that very hard to believe.
- “SpiralFrog has convinced the major labels that advertising revenue is the future.” Read the fine print. SpiralFrog has paid Universal UP FRONT to license their entire catalog. Every other major label will require a similar commitment. The labels aren’t betting the farm on advertising revenue. They’ve probably already made 75-80% of their money off of this before SpiralFrog’s service has even launched. Sure they get a cut of the ad revenue, but I assure you that’s gravy. They’re already eating their mashed potatoes.
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Formerly titled "one man's pop culture commentary", I've decided to re-label this for a few reasons:
(1) It's now home for all my online 'stuff'
(2) the search engines like it better
(3) the posts will be less pop-culture focused
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- Nolin: I like the analogy, Scott. Makes me wonder if/when there will be a PVR commercial-skipping or BitTo [...]
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1 Response to 5 reasons why SpiralFrog will never work
Albert Lai
September 7th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
This is totally true, and the additional fact is, unless SpiralFrog has the music all available online, there is going to be a product by week two that will help crack the DRM and, whoops, the songs that people downloaded that were supposed to be revenue generators and SpiralFrog is nothing more than a glorified Napster knock-off.