Spiral Frog – Come And Get Your Music!
Posted on 15. Feb, 2008 by The Gimcracker in Music
Remember Finetune, Deezer, and TheSixtyOne? I’ve got another one for you, and it’s called SpiralFrog. This one lets you actually download songs and play them on your computer and MP3 player. The downside is you can’t use an iPod (here’s a list of compatible devices). I know I just lost most of you, but for the non-iPod n00bs who are still reading, I’ll continue.
They’ve got over a million songs available for download, including tons of music videos, so I’m assuming it’s basically the same library that most other subscription-based sites have (i.e. Napster).
Ha, there must be an expiration date on the music you download.
Nope.
Pssshh, you must have to pay a monthly fee for the site after a certain amount of time.
Nuh uh.
OMG, the song selection and music quality must be terrible!
Wrong.
Well then it must be full of spyware and hax0ringz and viri.
Stop it.
Ok, well then how in the world can you just download free music to play on your computer/MP3 player? Very simple, the answer is straight out of SpiralFrog’s FAQ section:
How come there’s no cost – what’s the catch?
SpiralFrog is an ad-supported Web site. We sell ads on our pages to advertisers who want to talk to you. And we give the majority of that advertising revenue to the music publishers and labels who own the music you’re downloading.Most of our song and video downloads take a short, consistent amount of time to complete, during which we encourage you to keep discovering new areas of the Web site. Every page you visit allows us to serve more advertising, thus building the revenues we can pay to the content creators.
We do NOT ask you for a credit card. But we do ask for your time and attention. And, for that, we thank you…
Why didn’t I think of that? Well, I’ve downloaded the, uh, downloader, and created my account (took about 1 second to do), but I did run into a barrier or two that I was able to easily overcome thanks to SpiralFrog’s FAQs. There was a point at which I had to download a Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox, and I also had to update my Windows Media Player security settings by blowing away my DRM folder, restarting WMP, and going to a web page in IE (not Firefox) before it would let me download songs.
Once I got over those hurdles I downloaded West Coast by Coconut records, which I’ve been wanting on my computer ever since I started over at TheSixtyOne – and VOILA! It worked like a charm!
There’s gotta be another catch, right? Actually there is. You have to renew your account every 30 days. How do you do that? Log in and answer a few questions. OMG easymode.
As amazing as this is, I have to admit I only use iTunes + iPod to listen to music, so I will probably not be using this service. Hopefully there’s someone out there who reads this and goes, “oh snap, i have a piece of sh** Zune, this site’s for me!”
If that happens, I’ve accomplished my goal.
I want a zune.
It doesn’t work with the new zune though.
It’s not going to work. They should have made it compatible to iPod. If you can burn to CD (which you probably can’t) you could then re-rip and then own the song DRM free (just like any music)…
I think you’re right, this service won’t last a long time, or at least won’t make it big, if they don’t figure out how to become compatible with the almighty iPod, which has around 4/5 of the market share in hard drive music players.
And no, you can’t burn them to CDs. Ouch.
Snapfrog has a cousin across the Atlantic. Qtrax. They encountred a few snags (major record label pull out) when they tried to launch.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23434386-details/Free+music+downloads+site+in+chaos+as+record+giants+pull+out/article.do
Anyway, it’s a fascinating trend to follow…the future of digital music and all that.
Also, sorry I did not know how to link in the comment without the hideously long address…
Apologies Gimcracker!