September 18, 2007

iTunes Losing Download Dominance?

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Stupid FrogSpiralfrog.com, an ad-supported free download service, launched today, and your iPod isn’t invited to the party. By the way, doesn’t that idiotic name bring you back to those heady internet startup days, when companies seemed to throw a dart at a color and an animal chart for their names? Redgorilla.com! Bluegiraffe.com! Anyway, that was good times. This Frog plans to feature over 2 million tracks within the next few months, most notably from Universal Music; the label had famously refused to renew a long-term contract with iTunes over pricing disagreements. SpiralFrog’s business model, such as it is, requires you to click on their ads to keep downloading songs, and they promise “no threat of viruses,” which I totally believe; I mean, why would the intertubes lie to us?

This development comes on the heels of NBC/Universal’s recent decision to jump ship entirely from iTunes and take its video content to Amazon’s new download service, the nearly-as-stupidly-named Unbox. It’s a box, but not a box! Derrrr! Apparently 40% of iTunes movie content was from Universal, and this became all too clear for me recently. I was searching through the iTunes movie section to grab some entertainment for a plane trip, and found slim pickings (sorry, Wild Hogs and Aeon Flux, but I’d rather read the in-flight magazine). NBC’s TV shows will also be exclusive to Amazon’s service, which totally sucks since I watched the whole season of “30 Rock” on my iPod last year, and that’s how I realized that was a good show. Sorry, Tina Fey.

While I’m all for competition, pulling your products from a popular store for spite just seems ridiculous, like, sorry, no orange juice at Safeway, we want to charge you twice as much at Albertson’s. Customers forced to search for their favorite shows will just give up and buy something else, or do what I did and grab a Bittorrent of the Simpsons movie, and feel only slightly guilty during the scene of Bart writing “I will not illegally download this movie” on the blackboard.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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