I’m afraid the word “gullible” seems to have been lost. In all the Spiral Frog reports so far, describing the “free music downloads” that Universal Music is planning, nobody has used the word.

I mean, here I am, listening to Radio 2, not paying anybody for the music. Heck, they aren’t even playing adverts! But if I want adverts (Universal Music seems to think they’ll be popular) I can tune in to another radio station. The main difference, really, between recording a piece of music from a radio, and downloading it from Universal, is that if I record it using something like Replay Radio, I can keep it forever.

So Universal is not “giving away” half its music store. What it is doing is what it has always done – allowed two-bit radio stations to play the stuff. The difference this time is the two-bit radio station is its own.

I expect to read a lot of newsgroup debate about how to transfer downloaded Spiral Frog material to MP3 format without keeping the “will self-destruct in six months” bit. This, presumably, is radically different from the debates on “how to transfer vinyl sound tracks to MP3” in that while both technical feats are too boring for the average teen to care about learning, there are subtle distinctions in the sound quality.

So, will the average teen buyers of music go for it? Probably not; people have come up with all sorts of “pay for this by listening to adverts” scams, and if they are truly effective – and you have to listen – then people don’t go for them. And if you can make a cup of tea while adverts play, people make cups of tea.

But that may be misleading. I used the word “scams” rather than “marketing strategies” because most of the people who announced such schemes never actually intended to make them work. At least, judging by the way they tried to implement them. It’s possible that if they’d done it professionally, as perhaps Universal will, they’d have succeeded.

But my bet is that Universal doesn’t care if the adverts do or don’t work. As long as some kids download “free” music and tell all their friends how cool it is, some of their friends will go and buy the stuff from legitimate retail outlets.

So the only gullible ones are the people who have solemnly agreed it’s a breakthrough in free downloads. No, it isn’t! It’s a marketing wheeze to sell more titles from the Universal catalogue. And I bet it works...