Universal Music Group (UMG) has teamed up with ad-sponsored digital music download service FreeAllMusic to provide a facility for music fans to download freely and legally music tracks from UMG’s stable of artists. The deal will give users up to 20 free music downloads per month, five per week starting every New Music Tuesday.
In case you’re not aware, FreeAllMusic is a fairly new music service offering downloadable, high-quality, iPod-compatible MP3s of popular songs that are advertiser-paid, free, legal and DRM-free. The catch? You have to watch a short video commercial before you can download an MP3. You have to do that to let FreeAllMusic continue providing the service. It is after all what’s paying their bills to keep the site running.
The good thing is, after watching the video commercial and downloading the MP3, you can now enjoy it anytime, anywhere minus the ads. Fair enough, right? Ok, before you folks jump for joy, let me just tell you that FreeAllMusic is a for US-only site. So bad luck for all of us non-US citizens of the world. But of course there are other alternatives to this service, if  you know what I’m referring to.
If you’re from the U.S., you need to register at FreeAllMusic.com and then simply select a participating brand, then watch the short video commercial. After which you can start downloading the mp3. You can also share your downloads to friends but they have to download it for themselves. And they should also watch the video commercial. Or post your music download to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that others may know about FreeAllMusic.com’s service and be compelled to watch video commercials in exchange for free music.
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Originally posted on January 11, 2010 @ 6:03 pm