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The choice for dig­i­tal music fans has got wider again with the announce­ment by new entrant Spi­ral­Frog that it will begin a free (ie ad-supported) music down­load ser­vice that will give users access to Vivendi’s Uni­ver­sal Music Group’s cat­a­logue (if you are in North Amer­ica that is). Uni­ver­sal is back­ing the new start-up and, as the world’s largest music com­pany, should be able to offer a rea­son­able selec­tion. And the magic word ‘free’ never hurts.

This is, of course, just the lat­est attempt to chal­lenge iTunes’ dom­i­nance in the (legal) down­load mar­ket. But for me, it kind of misses the point.

The future isn’t about down­load­ing. Sorry, it just isn’t. The sooner iTunes wannabes work that out, the better.

Rather than see­ing the future as a ver­sion of the online music store (even if the prod­ucts are free), a more inter­est­ing metaphor is the juke­box. Fast con­nec­tions, wide­spread WiFi, boun­ti­ful cheap stor­age — it all adds up to the mother of all jukeboxes.

It’s not so dif­fi­cult to pic­ture the future sce­nario. I have a WiFi/WiMax/3G enabled player (at home, in the car, in my pocket) and a sub­scrip­tion account with an iTunes-like on-demand ser­vice. Then I sim­ply pick and choose what to stream as my mood takes me. It’s not rocket surgery.

Some ser­vices (eg Rhap­sody) are already head­ing off in this direc­tion. What’s cur­rently lack­ing is uni­form WiFi cov­er­age (although in many coun­tries, 3G appears to offer an inter­est­ing option). Once that’s in place, why would I want to down­load music (free or otherwise)?

Sources: Reuters, BBC, Jupiter and a whole bunch of others.

UPDATE: take a look at MP3tunes for some­thing a lit­tle more interesting.

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