The James Kilgour BlogA Life Blog.

SpiralFrog.com is a fairly new music download site. So what? There are loads out there, and how can their prices beat a giant like iTunes? Well. They have. All music on SpiralFrog is free. Yep, nada. But don’t worry, they are legal. SpiralFrog is legal, free ad supported downloads.

On a recent trip to the US, I managed to get onto the site and try it out, and I was surprised. It has quite a lot of music on it, from both Universal and EMI, downloading is very quick, and the ads are hardly noticeable after a while, and no worse than any other site with Adsense etc.

Now, the music does carry DRM, which is very restrictive: you can’t burn the music to a cd, use it on an iPod or Zune, and every user is required to sign in and complete a survey every 30 days to keep their music alive.

Neither the DRM or the stupid surveys (which are the same every month!) bother me. The only real problems are the geo-banning; currently the site is only available for those in the US or Canada (like so many sites), and also, the music available is quite limited. They boast 1.2 million tracks, but they have a lot of Orchard auto-biographies for the big artists like Madonna and Britney Spears.

Until SpiralFrog can sign up Sony BMG and WMG, their site will never be any fear fro the likes of iTunes.  But what is their now is very good. My worry would be for the longevity of the business though. For the brief time I used the site, I never once clicked an ad, but downloaded about 60 songs. How can SpiralFrog subsidise this for the millions of users it has accumulated? This will be the site’s real challenge, engaging users with ads, and getting to the point of revenue.

JK