First Look: SpiralFrog Offers Free Music with a Hefty Price
SpiralFrog promises free music with a catch. You can download and listen to music on your PC or take it with you on compatible portable music players in exchange for viewing ads and answering questions periodically.
Seemed fair to me, but after spending three hours trying to get the service to work correctly I?m not quite sure SpiralFrog is worth the price in hassles and tradeoffs.
My biggest beef with SpiralFrog is that the service delivered far more error messages than music tracks to me. If the service worked as advertised I might recommend it and use it. When SpiralFrog did work the way it was supposed to (for about 10 minutes) I liked it. But sadly the service performed unreliably.
SpiralFrog's Pitch
SpiralFrog is the latest entry into the music subscription space. It is an ad-supported service that allows registered users to download music tracks and music videos for free. The ads pay for the music and SpiralFrog splits the ad revenue with the record companies. The service requires you to visit the site at least once a month ? otherwise your music and videos lockup and become unplayable.
Most of SpiralFrog's content at launch is from Vivendi's Universal Music Group. The service boasts more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos for download today. In the near future SpiralFrog says it will add 2 million tracks of independent artists.
(This is SpiralFrog Web-based download manager)
Music and videos downloaded from the site are encoded with copy protection that prevents the tracks from being played back on any PCs other than the one you downloaded the tracks to originally. But you can put the tracks onto a portable music player so long as it is compatible. Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune devices are not compatible. My Sansa e200 series MP3 player is. CD burning of SpiralFrog is also not allowed.
For a list of compatible portable music players SpiralFrog is directing people to the PlaysForSure.com Website.
The last catch is music tracks that I downloaded were encoded at 128kbps which didn't sound that good to me. For these reasons I would say SpiralFrog's future is iffy. But if you don't own on an iPod or Zune, or need to listen to music on a CD player, and can put up with the less than great sound quality than SpiralFrog could fill a cheapskate niche.
Pros
On the plus side, SpiralFrog's catalog may not be competitive with Apple's iTunes catalog but with SpiralFrog's relationship with Vivendi what you get is access to Vivendi's catalog which is the world's largest record company.
I also noticed the amount of ads I had to view while downloading and listening to music were minimal. The terms of service does not require me to download any adware or spyware in exchange for music which instantly makes it better than adware-stuffed Kazaa. The only program I had to install on my PC was a SpiralFrog download manager that appears harmless ? so far.
When I played SpiralFrog music tracks back in Windows Media Player I didn't have to watch any ads either.
The bad news was the amount of problems I had with the service.
Errors Galore
Sadly SpiralFrog suffers from startup hiccups that make the service unusable at this time. The site itself is slow as molasses sometimes taking over one minute to navigate from one page to a next. Sometimes pages don?t load at all delivering 404 ?page cannot be found? errors.
Other times when I was downloading tracks I was delivered a SpriralFrog message indicating that a download was complete. However when I checked the folder SpiralFrog downloaded the track to the music file was nowhere to be found.
Another annoyance is having to babysit multiple downloads. When I tried to download a Blues Traveler album I had to initiate (with a click) each song on the album as an individual download. I'm not sure if this is to get you to view more ads or not. But it did not inspire any love for SpiralFrog or its advertising partners. To add insult to injury of the 11 songs I had supposedly downloaded the Blues Traveler album to my PC only two tracks could be found.
SpiralFrog's Privacy Policy
I took a quick look at the SpiralFrog privacy policy which states it collect information when "you register for membership, renew your monthly membership, enter contests, participate in surveys, and other online activities located throughout the site." The privacy policy also stated you can anticipate a SpiralFrog email newsletter and possibly marketing pitches from partners. SpiralFrog says you can opt out of receiving these e-mails.
I really don't see myself participating in much more than downloading music when the service is working properly and lets me. If SpiralFrog starts requiring me to take marketing surveys and sends me lots of spam I'm gone. For that reason I suggest you sign up with SpiralFrog with a disposable e-mail address you won't mind ditching in the future if you start getting a lot of spam.
I'm going to give SpiralFrog a months before I return. I hope by then it works out the kinks. If you're brave enough give SpiralFrog a try and let me know how you like it.
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I thought this was an interesting bit in their terms & services...
"If your membership lapses by more than 30 days, your membership to SpiralFrog is deemed to have been cancelled, and the songs you have downloaded from the SpiralFrog Web site will no longer play on your computer and/or the portable devices to which you have transferred the music files."
This means if the site goes down alltogether, we're sol? That they have control of these music files like this is somewhat irritating (i'd like to be able to put these on cds because of the incompatibility with ipods)
I can't complain about downloads, I've had extremely fast speeds and hadn't even noticed the quality difference.
I found a UK based website called We7.com which is backed by Peter Gabriel from Genesis. It doesnt have any of the problems that come with Spiral frog. For a start you download to own, meaning that you arent required to re-subscribe every 30 days and once the track is downloaded its yours, DRM free, works on all players. Touch would, I havent recieved a single error message when using the service. The model is different because it encorporates a 10 second audio ad into the download itself. I thought it would bother me a lot more than it does, its kind of like radio, and apparently after keeping the track for a month you can re-download it advert free! The catalogue isnt as big as spiral, but I think the model is better! Check it out - We7
Oooh, c'mon you guys at we7..... We all know this is you on every fucking comment for SprialFrog and Qtrax, trying to hype you're own poor business model...STOP IT before it gets embarrasing!