Universals ‘free’ download croaks

More details have arrived about Universals ‘Free’ download service. As we suspected, more is less.

Details of the new services reveal that for each track you will be expected to sit through 90 seconds of adverts before it starts the download.

Secondly, the tunes will only last for six months before they expire and you need to go through the whole process again.

Thirdly, the service will not work on iPods, which is the market leading brand for ‘MP3’ players. It’s not even guaranteed that it will work on other MP3 players either.

Things don’t look too good given the limited supply of tracks – 300,000 versus Apple iTunes’ 3 million, and that the average CD which contains 12 tracks means sitting through 18 minutes of adverts per CD – not something we expect today’s ‘skip the ads’ Tivo generation to tolerate for long.

Sources

Free challenge to iTunes The Business News Source