Justice on Kimmel

I'm not generally a poster of clips for clips sake, but first off, I love this track and also this performance, in all its lip-synced glory, definitely brought a smile to my face:

Kissing Another Frog

Radiohead leaving copies of their latest album In Rainbows alongside a virtual tip jar may lead to the press dubbing the record business dead, but frankly, it’s hard to eulogize the Big Four who have essentially slit their own wrists to remain relevant.

Kanye West and 50 Cent sold over 1.5 million albums combined in one September week this year to land numbers one and two on the Billboard charts. People will still pay for music, and the labels are right to an extent, increasingly, people want their music digitally; but at the end of the day people want one thing more than anything else, freedom.

Sorry, we never intend to evoke George W., but people want and expect SOME degree of freedom.

People still love music. That will not change. Yes, the iPod Touch is sexy tech, but it’s also, at its core, a screaming validation that people are voracious consumers of music and want to carry as much music as their solid-state chips and mini hard drives will allow. The problem is DRM and closed ecosystems. This is why SpiralFrog will fail.

The ad-supported download service had princely ambitions, but leaves you—as per usual—shackled like an unfortunate peasant in the gallows. Not only does it keep me from listening to my music wherever, whenever thanks it to its DRM; but it’s yet another in a looooooong line of tests by the music industry. The suits need to get a clue, the patient is coding and instead of going for the defibrillators, they’re sending blood samples to their lab a few towns over…by bike messenger.

SpiralFrog’s available catalog boasts 750,000 songs, but it’s, numbers aside, a joke. Searches for the following artists, led to no results or at best unauthorized biography discs: T-Pain, Foo Fighters, Madonna, Rolling Stones, Linkin Park, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, and so on and so on. As we browsed the site, house ads continued to pop up promoting the availability of Kanye’s new album, SpiralFrog has only six tracks available.

iTunes has no problem with the music, it’s got pretty much everything out there, not to mention, its own exclusives. iTunes problem is the software, its proprietary DRM’d AAC leaves you with only two hardware choices...iPod or iPod. Obviously, by the number of white earbuds we’ve all seen over the last few years, we know many people have made that choice with a smile, with many others have searched for someone…ANYONE to give them an alternative that allows them to be forever tied to their favorite songs, instead of Cupertino.

This is why SpiralFrog is disappointing. New ad-supported model or not, they are still tying the music to the same old DRM. Coating your tracks in an inaudible set of terms and conditions is the same reason we can’t take any of the legal download services seriously. Until they get a clue, we’ll continue to get the same DRM-free music that comprises 90% of sales…from CDs.