Universal free music service continued….

Universal to take on pirates!!

No, relax, this has nothing to do with Universal Pictures trying to take on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise with a Ricky Tomlinson fronted all singin’ all dancin’, swashbuckling Pugwash trilogy (although maybe it’s something they should think about! James Cameron’s next 3D epic perhaps?). Or sending Lady Gaga with whatever it is hiding in her tight Shrew skin imitation leotard to fight the Somalian super tanker stealers somewhere on the high seas. No in fact I’m chatting about Universal’s internet download bunk up with www.freeallmusic.com or SpiralFrog (www.mymojo.com), from hunting around on the internet they both seem to be grabbing a bit of URG’s pie so I’m not sure who to trust!?

Anywho here’s a little bit of info for you. On 11th January 2010 Universal Music Group announced that it was getting into bed with freeallmusic.com to offer music fans the chance to download its back catalogue for FREE! All that was required from you was that you had to sit through a few adverts for affiliate companies/products of your choosing (from the list that they provide for you) and you would be given 20 downloads a month/5 a week (songs or albums I doth not know!?) in return. Good deal? Bad deal? Well, check it…

UMG are the World’s biggest music company with a shed load of record labels under their Vivendi corporate umbrella (ella ella) and are the first record company to offer this kind of service. Although HMV, Virgin, MTV and Microsoft are all soon to follow suit, so this can only be a good thing right?

The one problem that I have is that I’m into a lot of different types of music, and like nothing more than discovering new up and coming bands. The problem with this is that a lot of bands are shying away from the big record companies and opting for self release or smaller independent record labels due to all of the pressure and constraints that are forced upon them by the larger companies. In turn this cuts down on many of the bands that I would consider downloading, legally of course. And on the flip side, not every teeny bopper chart topper is on Universal, so for the Top of the Pops fans this limits your options somewhat also.

As I mentioned above, and I have never done this, but many of my friends have downloaded music from illegal torrent websites (tut tut), however I personally have been scared witless of putting food on Osama Bin Laden’s table and funding terrorism, as those adverts on many DVD’s would have you believe, so I have always been a good little boy and either bought the CD’s themselves or copied my friends music libraries onto my hard drive. So the option of legally downloading tracks for free straight from the record companies could appeal to many. Let’s check this out…

I tried to access the service to find out the crack of it all, but its only available to our buddies in the US or for a useless (to me) mojo ringtone site, so I hit a bit of a brick wall here and can’t give any kind of info on the usage of the site, however I’m guessing that it will be simple to use as they are going up against the already established Apple Store and don’t want to befuddle their already loyal fan base.

Did you know? that for every legal download 40 are done illegally (no wonder no one can find Bin Laden, he’s probably holed up in some secret layer fashioned out of an old volcano with all of the loot he must be raking in!). So it’s no wonder that record companies want to cut down on this and gain a little bit of the $1.1 billion market. So up step Universal to the plate, 1st at bat.

This is all well and good; however I have discovered some minor flaws thus far:

• FreeAllMusic.com is only open to our friends from across the pond, so unless you’re a yank, living in yanksville you aint getting bubkiss!

• Search for spiralfrog.com and you end up getting redirected to mymojo.com which is some shit bag mobile ringtone site. And unless you were one of the backwardly inbreed social rejects who paid good 6 fingered money to get Crazy Frog to number 1 in the UK you won’t be liking this much!

There are as well a few other mishaps waiting to befall the download generation. I give them to you thusly:

Downloaded songs from, spiralfrog.com, or no wait its mymojo.com won’t play on your iPod (although it does state on Universals press release that freeallmusic.com downloads are compatible!?) as you have to use DRM from Microsoft (which was conveniently cracked the other day) and seeing as everyone in the world has at least 2 of these little iPod buggers, you’re a little scuppered! Now what would MacGyver do?

Another small obstacle is that any music downloaded cannot be copied onto CD. So unless you like making mix tapes for loved ones, but hey let’s face it this is becoming an old past time, like eating bread and dripping for tea or watching Die Hard on DVD rather than crisp as chips Blue Ray, I don’t foresee this as being a massive problem.

So in summary…

It is still early days as the announcement was only made at the turn of the year, and I’m sure a European site will soon be sent to the front lines to fulfil our downloading needs, but in the meantime it seems that your best bet would be to stick with iTunes or Pirate Bay (who said that!?).

Article by Ryan Cook