Free music site SpiralFrog makes debut

Free-music site SpiralFrog made its long-awaited debut on Sunday evening, defying critics who said the struggling company would never get off the ground.

The ad-supported music store opened with more than 770,000 songs and 3,500 music videos from numerous independent labels and Universal Music Group, the largest of the top four record companies.

When the company announced plans in August 2006 to offer ad-supported music free of charge to users media pundits called it an iTunes killer. But in December, New York-based SpiralFrog suffered an executive shakeup, burned through most of its cash and has since acknowledged selling secured notes, which are essentially loans, to fund operations.

The company is banking on revenues generated from ad sales to help cure its financial ills, said founder Joe Mohen. The idea behind the company was to offer a legal alternative to illegal file sharing.

But can SpiralFrog overcome a handicapped music offering?

SpiralFrog's music library was expected by critics to be hamstrung by a relatively small music library. A quick run through of the site on Sunday showed that SpiralFrog offered eight of the top 10 best-selling songs of the week, according to Billboard.

Universal owns 25 percent of the global music market, so SpiralFrog is not without some firepower behind it.

Songs can be downloaded to any portable device that is compatible with Windows digital rights management. Each user is allowed to transfer their music to two different devices.

Users must renew their monthly memberships every 30 days to continue hearing SpiralFrog's music files, which is typical for subscriber services like Yahoo or Napster.

[Blito]

Deezer is pretty good and free

Deezer.com offers top bit rate quality on their songs. I have been using it and impressed by their flash based easy to use interface yet with tuncated album info.

Seems to have most of what you want especially with the older stuff. Newer acts are still not showing enough songs on the site though like Army of Anyone is not even there and Filter only has a few songs.

So the songs play right away with playlist use but no downloading I don't think. It's great for parties.

[Ringhorne]

Mac users need not apply

SpiralFrog is a non-Mac site. Huh. How 1980s-90s of it. Like
MSNBC's video access -- snubbing Mac users with an oddly
stubborn need for controlling access to... news! Good luck with
that, hoppy.
I hope MSNBC is an advertiser, as you're made for each other, it
seems.

[ewelch]

Won't work

A subscription site? Oh yeah, like that hasn't been a dismal failure
each time it's tried. PLUS advertising? What a joke.

And Windows Media DRM.

A trifecta of failures in the music business. Or should that be hat
trick? (At least in Canada.)

[tekwiz4u]

Rent my music for 30 days??!!!!

A CD that contains a 1 song on average cost $2.00. Even if its free, after 30 days my music is unplayable. This is like holding my music "hostage" unless I return to the web site to validate my interests in already crappy songs out there.

I pay = I Keep = unrestricted playback on any device = better solution.

Not advocating music piracy, but these record execs need to smell what they're shoveling. Put your diffreneces aside and stop treating consumers like idiots. All of you merge and create a "i-tunes" like store with $2.00 downloads and your problems WILL go away for sure.

[franglais--2008]

not available outside of US and Canada

Voila! Subject line says it all; if you're one of the millions who would like to try it, but don't live in US or Canada, you outta luck :-(

[GGGlen]

Most exclusionary service EVER

1) Excludes the most popular MP3 player on the planet.

2) Excludes the approximately 25 million Mac users in the US.

3) Excludes most of the world's population.

PLUS...

Tied to the biggest failure in the online music industry-
Microsoft's DRM.
Will they get subscribers?
Sure they will.
There are enough "I hAtoRZ aPpLEzoRs" users out there, willing
to endure any insult, to guarantee at least SOME usage, but it'll
be interesting to see just how much money the industry is
willing to lose to prop this service up.

[mhick]

Not worth the hassle

I've been using SpiralFrog for about 10 days. While I like the price (free), the hoops you have to jump through have made me decide that the service isn't worth the trouble. Here are just a couple of my beefs:
- The site is badly designed. It reloads the whole page each time you click any link. For example, you find an artist and want to look at the list of albums. [Reload] You click on an album to see what songs are on it. [http://Reload.|http://Reload.] You see a song you want and click on it. [http://Reload.|http://Reload.] It's about as non-Ajax-y as you can imagine.
- The catalog is deceptive. It only contains Universal music, but pretends to have much, much more. Virtually every well-known artist has a "listing" on Spiralfrog, but you have to scroll down the page before finding out that there's nothing to download.
- The search is awful. Spiralfrog has a pretty good selection of Elvis Costello (one of my faves). But only a couple of songs came up when I searched for "Elvis Costello." I stumbled across the rest when I was looking for something completely different.
- The download queue is awful. You can't just queue up a bunch of music and let it download overnight. After each song downloads, you have to click "Download next song." Then, the DRM software is so buggy, there seems to be a 20% chance that the next song won't download at all, and another 20% change that you'll think you downloaded the song, only to find that it won't play on your computer.

[doriandm]

No iPod support, No MAC support, No CDs

I'm sorry, but this service is entirely useless to me. I use both MACs and PCs. My primary portable device is an iPod and I like to burn CDs to listen to while I am in the car. SpiralFrog doesn't support any of this. There is absolutely no reason at all to consider their service. I am more than happy to pay for quality music. I currently use eMusic for my music downloads (although their catalog is a bit limited), but I do not agree with DRM and once I have purchased a song or an album, I should be able to move it freely to all of the devices I use for listening. SpiralFrog is an entirely useless service from my perspective.

[Marc Cohen]

Pioneers Get the Arrows in Back

I agree Spiralfrog will probably not make it but advertising supported downloaded music will succeed. People won't pay for music anymore and ad-support is the only way to give consumers what they want and artists what they need.

For full coverage of this emerging field, read the Ad-Supported Music Central Blog at: http://ad-supported-music.blogspot.com/

[daveturnley]

A badly executed mediocre idea

Besides being slow, awkward and misleading (as others have pointed out), it's also REALLY slow, awkward and misleading.