Everything Is Media: The Digital Music Edition

As further evidence that technology is turning everything into media, Universal Music announced that it would be backing SpiralFrog, a digital music site that will attempt to transform the music business into a media business by selling advertising rather than charging fees:

Universal Music, the world’s largest music company, is backing a start-up that will allow consumers to download songs for free. It will rely on advertising for its revenues, offering a different business model from that of Apple Computer’s popular iTunes music store.

The move reflects music companies’ willingness to experiment as they try to capture some profit from the boom in digital distribution still dominated by illegal file-sharing networks.

The service, SpiralFrog, represents a departure from Apple’s 99 cents-a-song business model and other legal download services which charge a subscription fee by being completely free. It is due to start up in December.

So now we can add music to Software-as-a-Service (i.e. Google), online retail, and a parade of other Web-enabled and digitalized business that are trying to transform themselves into add-supported media.

You’ve got to pity the poor advertiser faced with figuring out how to allocate ad dollars across all these new media.