There have been a lot of reports over the weekend about the demise of SpiralFrog. SpiralFrog was an ad supported music streaming and download service that never really took off.
Having raised as much as $12 million in VC and debt funding, the company made a splash in August 2006 (after 2 years in operations) when Universal Music made their entire music catalog available for free download through SpiralFrog, joined by EMI a month after. About a year after, SpiralFrog started handing out private beta invitations (what took them so long?)
Attorneys representing defunct music service SpiralFrog have notified investors not to expect any returns. Whatever money comes from liquidating assets will go to a group that loaned the company an “amount exceeding $34 million.”
Is this going to be the start of more ad supported music download and streaming services moving towards the deadpool? I can see Qtrax is going to now have a lot of trouble is this economic environment and Im sure they will be the next to be closing.
Qtrax has released a press release this morning stating that they have finally signed Sony BMG to their catalogue.
Qtrax is a legal P2P downloading service. In January 2008, Qtrax was overeager to announce it’s launch during the Midem conference and misrepresented ongoing negotiations and expired deals with major recording labels as being signed deals.
Qtrax is a very interesting service that has never really lived up to expectations. I’m keen to see how the service grows and if they can actually deliver decent royalty rates for the content providers. Here at RouteNote we are always looking for the next site to take off and Qtrax is definitely in the mix.
After spending months in public beta and lots of changes to the ad supported music service, We7 is about to launch out of beta with a bang.
We7 have launched with a “Big Listen” campaign. This new service has some great new features including Free on-demand, unlimited access to full tracks and albums, “Search, Click & Play”, A ‘Celestial Jukebox’ with several million track, ‘Play Anywhere’ – a link and play system for blogs and websites, Users can create playlists, share with friends and buy mp3′s, Payments to rights owners and artists.
The first thing you will notice with the new site is that they have a completely new design. Other new additions include a Magazine, Blog and a much improved list of advertisers. Im sure we will be hearing a lot more from We7 in 2009!
