SpiralFrog: Free Music Alive And Hopping
Nick Gonzalez
15 comments »
Remember SpiralFrog that free music download service that announced itself nearly a year ago? Well, after slowly releasing invites to Canadians, we received a private beta invitation.
SpiralFrog originally made a splash when they sealed a deal with Universal BMG to give away free downloads of some of their songs in exchange for a share of on-site ad revenue. Later they closed a deal with EMI and have since added a bunch of smaller labels totaling over 700,000 songs. However, now we know a little more about how their free system works.
Songs on SpiralFrog are not ad-supported through interstitial advertising or free in the sense that you can bring them anywhere. Instead, you get DRMed songs (WMA) leased to you for a free 30 day membership (or you can buy on Amazon). You can renew your membership, and the lease to play your songs, by answering survey questions (# concerts per year, how you discover music, etc). All that data helps SpiralFrog know what kind of ads to serve on the site.
To keep the whole system secure, they’ve locked down the download process end to end DRM controls. First you have to get a download manager, and then ensure you have Windows Media Player 9.0 or up. The system is kind of annoying and only works on Windows machines since it uses Microsoft DRM. Although, Microsoft DRM has already been cracked. The DRM requirement also means the songs only play through Windows Media Player, making them unportable. Unlike other DRM setups, though, there doesn’t appear to be a limit to the number of computers you can download to as long as you set SpiralFrog up on them.
Once the system is in place, you can search for artists and download their songs/videos individually. The songs are queued in a download manager and stored locally by artist and album in your SpiralFrog folder. The system seems to have intentionally been crippled so you view more advertising, with downloads happening one at a time and only while on the site. Using the site, I was able to download a bunch of songs and play them with no problem, but other early beta user have had trouble.
I don’t know if SpiralFrog will be able to sustain their business off of on-site advertising and affiliate music sales. A lot of other services are simply going DRM free, not download free. Blogmusik also recently went legit in France, but the US courts and music industry are a lot harder to sway. However, limiting the lease time on the songs means they can continuously tweak what hoops their users need to hop through to keep playing the music they download. For now it may be a simple option if you want a (legal) source of free tunes.
Interesting name!
This is actually pretty brilliant, in my opinion. It’s great to see a company that realizes the difficult environment they’re operating within, and instead of just doing the same old $1 DRMd download or RIDICULOUS ad-supported songs which everyone hates, they’re getting quality, relevant information from users to in turn improve their services to improve the customer experience by selling better quality stuff.
Here’s to more companies trying to make their services better rather than taking the easy way out and hurting the customer experience.
[sigh] another awesome idea that didn’t come out of my brain.
Did you mean Universal, BMG or Universal BMG?
BMG(prior employer) was bought out by Sony and is now Sony BMG.
Yeah, I don’t like the name. Too many “rrr” sounds in the name.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a great idea in the abstract, but in reality, it has nothing over Bit Torrent, which is DRM-free, and most importantly, just plain free. No advertisements, countless page views, ultra convenient and fast. It’s only advantage is that it’s “legal”; and again, that’s really mostly a abstract, theoretical advantage.
I think the ad-rev share idea works though, but with streaming music, rather than downloads. I write about it extensively here:
http://freshbreakfast.com/2007.....-industry/
Sorry, that link works in theory, but in reality, here’s the correct one
….
http://freshbreakfast.com/2007.....-industry/
I recently received a beta invite, and have since downloaded a total of fifty songs, I have a Creative zen vision M, you can put the music on there, and it plays fine, admittedly it’s not the best sound quality (128 kbps) but it’s not terrible either, especially since it’s free
I just don’t think anyone wants DRM’d music, even for free, except those with lots of time on their hands.
I like the idea, though it does seem a bit cumbersome at this point.
I recently got a beta invite too and have downloaded 101 songs so far. It works great on my Creative Zen Xtra. It sounds fine to me although I’m not an audiophile. The ads are fairly unobtrusive and I’ve had very few problems with it. I’ve had a lot more problems with other services such as rhapsody. I’m really glad I don’t have an iPod now with this service.
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Great idea. Just checked out the site and it is loading very, very, very slowly.
http://www.beilblog.com
just heard about sprialfrog today and have spent all day just trying to download the download manager - really sluggish and now i feel like i’ve wasted my whole day - i thought computers were supposed to be getting easier to use, instead it’s just constant jumping through hoops