SpiralFrog

» see spiralfrog.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

spiralfrog was a us and canada product. the licensing did not extend to turkey, the registration form rejected non-northamerican ip addresses, and the catalog ran on windows media audio with drm tokens that wanted to phone home to a us-routed activation server. i was on a ttnet adsl line in ankara through the whole 18-month life of the service. spiralfrog was a service i could read about but not sign up for.

the company launched on 17 september 2007 with joe mohen as chairman and founder. the pitch was that the major labels could finally allow free downloads if the files were drm-locked and ad-supported. universal music group signed on as the launch catalog partner. emi music publishing and sony atv covered publishing rights. bmi and the canadian musical reproduction rights agency cleared the radio-rate equivalent for streaming.

on 19 march 2009 the creditors recalled the loans. spiralfrog had borrowed at least 9 million dollars across the previous year to keep operating. web advertising rates had collapsed through the 2008 recession. the company shut down operations the same day. the techcrunch headline read "spiralfrog goes belly up."

~ the record ~

~ what the drm was for ~

the files were wma with playready protection. each download came with a 60-day license. on day 61 the file refused to play unless the user logged back into spiralfrog and clicked through an ad to renew the license. the renewal cycle was the inventory the advertisers were paying for.

the model worked on paper. in practice the renewal step lost users every time it ran, the drm did not work outside windows media player and a small set of compatible portable players, and apple devices refused to play any of it. by 2008 the ipod owned the market the service was trying to reach.

~ the catalog gap ~

sony and warner never signed full distribution deals. spiralfrog launched with about 770,000 universal tracks and grew the catalog past 3 million across 2008 with smaller indies, but the absence of sony and warner meant the service could not deliver about half of the top 100 of any given week. itunes had every label. amazon mp3 launched 25 september 2007 with every label and no drm. imeem and lala covered the streaming side without download obligations. spiralfrog launched into the worst possible week for an ad-supported drm-locked download service.

~ what really happened ~

the loan paper was held by hedge funds. through 2008 spiralfrog issued bridge notes against expected advertising revenue that did not arrive. by early 2009 the creditors stopped extending the bridges. on 19 march 2009 the demand letters went out and the operating cash was gone the same morning. the music ally and techcrunch obituaries the next day used the word "doomed" in headlines.

the drm renewal servers were the part of the story that hurt the user side. files downloaded in february 2009 stopped playing in april. there was no migration path, no offline unlock, no refund for paying advertisers either. the licensing structure that made the service possible at launch made the wind-down ugly.

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