Remember Spiralfrog, the much-hyped free-music service that offers DRM-laden tracks incompatible with most people’s portable media players?

Here’s our summary of Spiralfrog from when the service went live:

The site lets you download tracks with Windows Media DRM. They can be used on some Windows computers and with compatible media players. Users need to register and visit the site every month or the tracks become unplayable.

The tracks cannot be burned to a CD and are incompatible with Macs and Apple’s iPods and iPhone.

According to the company’s SEC filing, in Q3, Spiralfrog lost $3.4 million on revenue of $20,400. The company has just $2.3 million in cash right now, and a total stockholder‚Äôs deficit of $6.2 million.

If building your business on ad-supported Windows Media DRM’d music wasn’t a bad enough idea, here’s how Spiralfrog plans to get themselves out of this hole:

“Execute marketing campaign in the United States aimed at 13-34 year olds, through one or more of the following approaches: hire gorilla (sic) marketing firms for unconventional promotions; consumer targeted press releases; advertising on some of the youth community sites; or hiring ‘bloggers’ to attract attention to us on the internet.”

Note to Spiralfrog management: You don’t have to pay “bloggers” to write about your service when your service doesn’t suck.

Note to investors: The tiny amount of money that people now pay for digital music isn’t a pain point that you can build a business around solving. Helping people find the music they really like, when faced with a flood of free music, is.

via paidContent

The New York Times’ Freakonomics has an interesting interview with musician & podcaster Jonathan Coulton, who became an Internet superstar as a result of his Thing A Week music podcast (podcast feed).

Last week, we asked for your questions for singer/songwriter/Internet celeb Jonathan Coulton. Thanks to all of you (including John Hodgman, or at least “John Hodgman“) for the questions, and thanks especially to Jonathan for his answers.

In it, he touches on a lot of topics relevant to all podcasters:

Q: You’ve been getting a lot of mainstream media play over the last year. How has that been different from the attention you’ve gotten from podcasters and other people in the Web 2.0 world? What are the ways each respective media space has contributed to your career? Also, touring is a big part of your life now. What were some of the biggest adjustments you needed to make to being on the road? And how do you balance the adjustment with trying to produce new music?

A: Yes, there’s definitely been a huge increase in mainstream media attention this last year, for which I’m very grateful. The interesting thing is that my business model is sort of at odds with that, or at least, it’s not plugged into it directly. A good example was the May 2007 piece in the Times, “Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Blog.” Big important newspaper, lots of readers, very complimentary piece, but it didn’t generate the huge spike in Web traffic that I expected to see. Contrast that with the link on the Penny Arcade blog over a year ago, which immediately generated a huge number of new visitors. They’re very different things. Chances are, a lot of people reading this now are not going to know what Penny Arcade is, but they have a huge and devoted following of people who love geeky things and know how to download an MP3. The Times is a much larger, but less focused, death ray. Which is not to say that MSM exposure doesn’t do anything at all, just that it’s harder to track its effects with Google Analytics. I think the best way to talk about the distinction is to say that Internet buzz has a very direct correlation to traffic and therefore sales, whereas mainstream media love tends to have more long-term benefits.

Q: How much attention have you paid to fan creations based on your work? Have you seen any of these creations — music videos, mostly? What did you think of them?

A: I pay a lot of attention, and I’m so grateful for each and every one of them. Some of them speak to me more than others, but each one is amazing to me simply because it exists at all. I wrote a post on my blog recently during a particularly misty moment in which I was considering the sheer number of people who have been plonked in front of my music because they watched a YouTube video that someone else made. There are literally millions of views across all the fan-made music videos. Not only is it a huge help in getting my music out there, but it’s so flattering and wonderful to think that something I created inspired creativity in someone else.

Q: Based on your experience with “Thing a Week” and the pay-what-you-want model for downloads, do you see this as the future for artists in the music industry?

A: I think there’s still a lot of room for things to change, but we’re definitely seeing pieces of what the solution will be. While everyone likes to say that consumers think music should be free, I don’t think that’s true. The Radiohead thing had less to do with business models and more to do with marketing, and granted, they are a super famous band so it’s hard to compare. But their experience and mine both seem to indicate that there are plenty of people who want to support artists they love — it’s ridiculous to think otherwise. If you’re a fan, you’re going to buy music, concert tickets and T-shirts.

I don’t know if pay-what-you-want is the answer, but I do know that the overhead it takes to record, distribute and market music is going to continue shrinking. It’s going to get easier and easier for artists and fans to find each other, and our culture as a whole has already

According to PCWeek’s Trustworthy Tech, iPhone owners passionately love their devices.

In its first year on the survey, the Apple iPhone scored a stunning 9.1 out of 10, beating the ratings that every other phone, from every carrier, in nearly every category, has received in the three years they’ve been including cell phones. The iPhone’s 9.6 scored in music and video playback, 8.2 for call quality (a score significantly better than average), 8.2 for coverage, and an 8.0 for earpiece volume show.

Almost all brands on nearly every carrier rated scores between 7.0 and 7.5 overall, with differentiations coming feature by feature.

Wonder why the Amazon Kindle is getting so much attention from top bloggers today?

A lot of people are scratching their heads on this, wondering why so many a-list blogs are jazzed about an expensive, ugly device that lets you buy expensive DRM’d content.

A device that’s kind of like a first-generation Zune for ebooks.

“Thanks Amazon for all the cash!”

So why all the love from top bloggers? Maybe it’s because Amazon’s paying them.

Here’s what Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble has to say about the deal:

“If you buy a Kindle and you buy my blog….I get 30%,” he notes. “Thanks Amazon for all the cash!”

Here are a few of the blogs that you can pay to view on the Kindle:

• Scobleizer – “For $400 this device is pretty damn remarkable.”
• GigaOm
• TechCrunch – “ugly but impressive”
• BoingBoing
• Paid Content
• Ars Technica
• SlashDot – “the future of reading?”

These blogs and many more (list) can anticipate getting a nice chunk of change if the Kindle is successful.

Maybe they should be as nice as Scoble and thank Amazon for all the cash! What do you think?

Zinio, a digital publishing and distribution platform for magazines and books, has introduced Zinio Mobile Newsstand for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a new way to read magazines for free on your mobile device.

“Apple’s newest devices were natural for the launch of the Zinio Mobile Newsstand,” said Rich Maggiotto, Zineo CEO. “Users will benefit from having their magazines in a high-fidelity, portable format that can be viewed practically anywhere.”

Zinio will initially offer free digital editions of top-selling monthly magazines targeted to the iPhone user, including:

• American Photo
• Black Enterprise
• Car & Driver
• Kiplinger’s
• Macworld
• Men’s Health
• NME
• Playboy
• Popular Mechanics
• Technology Review
• Woman’s Day

You can try the service out at http://www.zinio.com/iphone. In our testing, the service was slow, but usable.

Magazines available in the Zinio Mobile Newsstand are exact replications of the print version, with added interactivity and share capabilities.

NCH Swift Sound‘s free WavePad audio editing software is now available for Mac OSX as well as for Windows. It’s a wav and mp3 editor, but also supports vox, gsm, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg and other formats.

WavePad is designed to let you make and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.

For a free editor, it offers a lot of interesting features, including normalization, effects, rate conversion, support for a lot of formats and even some more esoteric functions like speech synthesis.

Here are the details: 

SyncTV, a new on-demand Internet video service based on open standards, has launched in beta mode.

SyncTV offers TV shows on an unlimited download basis in DVD quality or better. The service lets you download whole seasons of TV shows and watch them when you want.

Based on open-standards, the SyncTV service works on Windows PCs, Macs and Linux PCs, and in the future it will also work on TVs and portable players.Once you have subscribed to a channel on SyncTV, you can download as many current and classic TV shows from that channel as you want, with many of the TV shows including every episode of every season.

Subscription fees range from $2 to $4 per month per channel. Shows will also be offered for sale at $2 per episode. The service is also advertising supported.

“We wanted to free up TV from the folks who make it difficult to innovate,” said SyncTV President John Gildred.

You can hear an audio introduction to SyncTV featuring Gildred below.

Ever wonder why a small handful of mainstream publications get early access to the latest gear from Apple and other tech companies?

If so, look no further than Steven Levy’s fluffer-style Newsweek piece on the Kindle, Amazon’s take on the eBook reader. Levy writes:

“The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer’s recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy.”

While Newsweek may think the Kindle is a milestone in a time of transition, it looks to us like a $400 closed system:

• While it can hold 200 ebooks, at $9.99 a pop it would take about $2,000 to load this baby up. That’s a lot of e-cash to be throwing in your backpack.
• It will let you subscribe to popular newspapers, but they papers that are already freely available on the Internet.
• It will also let you subscribe to a small selection of blogs, but it will cost you another buck or two, per blog, per month.

Apple has found with the iPod that people don’t fill their iPods with songs purchased from the iTunes store. Instead, people spend about $20 on iTunes purchases and fill the rest of their iPod space with things like songs ripped from CDs and free audio and video podcasts.

If the iPod is a precedent for the Kindle, people aren’t likely to want to spend much on ebooks. People might be interested, though, in a reader that could increase the value that they get from the Internet, a reader that would let you take online content and read it offline, away from your computer, in a comfortable environment or in places where you don’t have access to the Internet.

In order to be anything more than a speedbump on the road to the future of written media, the Amazon Kindle needs to be open to the rapidly expanding world of user-generated content. With 88,000 ebook titles, the Kindle is a expensive, boring gadget. With open support for Internet content, it could be a contender for the next new thing.

Update: Kindle will offer about 300 blogs at a buck/month. Anybody know what cut the blogs are getting? If you want to send yourself documents to work around the closed nature of the Kindle, it costs ten cents a pop.

“Each Kindle has a unique and customizable e-mail address. This allows you and your contacts to e-mail Word documents and pictures wirelessly to your Kindle for only $.10. Kindle supports wireless delivery of unprotected Microsoft Word, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PRC.”

Update 2: It looks like not even paying bloggers to hype the Kindle is enough to generate positive buzz for the Amazon Kindle. “I can’t really recommend this,” writes Robert Scoble. “Whoever designed this should be fired and the team should start over.”

Wizzard Media has announced that the U.S. Navy has signed on for its first-ever podcast advertising campaign.

The campaign will continue through the end of January. It encompasses 20 different shows in the Wizzard Media network, covering the categories of music, gaming and sports & recreation.

To execute the buy, Wizzard was faced with its most extensive insertion order to date. The Navy’s 20-podcast campaign includes more than 3,000 ad placements across 1,200-plus individual audio and video podcast episodes. The total downloads for this campaign will exceed 6.5 million, with results being certified by Wizzard using Nielsen//NetRatings to verify the scope of audiences for the U.S. Navy and participating podcasts.

“Podcast advertising is on the cusp of becoming a red-hot vehicle for marketers, and Campbell-Ewald should be credited for being ahead of the curve on behalf of its client,” said Jim Else, Vice President, Sales, Wizzard Media. “With its podcast campaign, the Navy is reaching a highly targeted, opt-in audience of high quality, on-going audio and video shows.”

Mega podcast host Wizzard Media has introduced a new iPhone podcast directory & receiver, iphone.wizzard.tv.

The Wizzard Media Receiver for iPhone, above, offers a podcast directory, formatted for iPhone, that lets you browse, listen to or view podcasts.

Here’s a walk-through of the new Web app from Wizzard’s Dave Mansueto: