Spiral Frog RIP

The world of music start ups is often fraught with litigation and shifting sands. Today Spotify continues to attract significant attention in the UK but even they have had their challenges.

Sadly one of the start-ups that offered so much, what seems so long ago when we were writing our Brave New World report appears to have died. Spiral Frog appeared to have lined up all the ducks; a heavyweight board, contracts with all the major labels, a compelling consumer model based on ad free music and the only negative was the time they took to get going. In August 2006 they had Universal Music, EMI and a launch but still took their time. However, although it continued and beat off many similar start-ups it wasn’t getting the consumer attention needed to satisfy and drive ads and fund their debt.

It appears that all the funding efforts to keep the company afloat have failed, causing another ad-supported free music download service to cease operations. If ad sponsored model fail to attract users and advertisers and music sales continue to slide it posses the interesting question of whether there is viable alternative to ‘free’.