Just like I hated those cover mount CD's.
Makes music look cheap - or free.
Something stinks.
Dan Chalmers from Warner Music said just what I feel in Music Week.

The thing is JK is that free music has always been with us (radio ?) and will always be. The public wants free music, i dont think it should be downloads but streaming music from a website (myspace for example).
Then you can pay a premium to get the CD quality version or a physical version.
Singles were devalued in the days the 1.99 CD was introduced (full version by the way not the 2 track version). Having said that i bought many CDs because they were 1.99.

Dear Jonathan,

Irrespective of the Spiral Frog (stupid name which is whyI already hate it too) situation, doesn't music already feel cheap and/or free to the many millions of p2p users?

TB

but I feel sure there are ways of changing this lack of respect for a creative art.
I'm lucky; I got my cash when people would pay for music and I'm now old enough not to care for the future of my own music.
But I worry about the art form in the next decades.

This is going to be an ongoing debate.

There's no doubt that the easy availability of music has cheapened/devalued the recorded versions of music.
And it's hard to see the way back from this .. (one way to raise value is to restrict availability, but this is difficult when it's so easy to copy this music).

Now young people (particularly) have not got into the habit of buying it - (although my 17 year old son likes to buy CD's as likes having a cd 'collection' - as well as MP3's on his MP3 player but I think he's an exception).

In genenal it seems as if they have got used to copying CD's, file sharing and MySpace. But they do seem to want to pay to see their favourite bands play live - and buy the T-shirts. However they don't seem very interested in seeing unsigned bands.

So the SpiralFrog (agree awful name) principle may be good if the artists get a share of the advertising revenue raised by the site - it's just an alternative way of raising the money .. (Don't think it will work though because something better will come along very soon after ...)

Stretch