Everyone is now well familiar with the story of Spiral Frog and how it buried the ad-supported download model. Reasons given for this are numerous, ranging from reports of blatant mismanagement to non-compatibility with iPods to consumer resistance to being force fed a 60 or 90 second commercial before the download begins. Let’s face it. Anybody with half a brain knew that it would flop. Crap model.

A couple of new kids on the block have launched recently and are making a little bit of noise. Both Guvera, an Aussie company, and Free All Music of Atlanta, GA. have just gone into private beta with similar models to Spiral Frog, but with some key differences. For one thing, they’re both offering MP3’s instead of Windows DRM’d pigeon shit. As I understand it, Free All Music makes the user suffer through a 60 second commercial before the download starts and Guvera basically sells each user to the advertiser of his choice for $4 a pop.

Good luck with that, fellas.

Obviously neither one of these companies will attract enough users to be a real consumer business, and they will each need tens of millions of users in order to do so. That’s not to say that they couldn’t reach some level of success as providers of bespoke services. But their models just won’t scale because they won’t have huge catalog. And you need a very deep catalog in order to be a viable consumer service.

Of course, let’s not forget that they probably have to pay full wholesale for every track they give away, and most likely in advance. My guess is that they will have to “top up” their accounts as if they are pay as you go mobile customers. And that can cause some serious cash flow problems.

And let’s not forget that people just don’t want to have to sit through a 30 or 60 second pre-roll before each download. Just not going to work. One of the main success drivers of any music service is instant gratification. I frankly think that users will actually get pissed off at advertisers who make them suffer through lame commercials before they get their free tracks. And in the case of Free All Music, users are limited to 5 downloads a week. Sorry, but nobody is going to go for that, especially when they can go to The Pirate Bay and get everything they want, including deep catalog, quickly and with very little hassle.

I’m sure that the founders of these companies are nice guys with the best of intentions. But they’re competing with illegal sites that, unfortunately for them, have way more to offer in both catalog and convenience. Free isn’t always free, and these two companies are probably going to learn that very soon. Bon chance, fellas.