Tech Shout!

SpiralFrog.com, a free music site launches on Monday in the US and Canada. After months of “beta” testing, the website, which is completely ad-supported, is open to the general public.

The main intention of SpiralFrog is to pull towards them all music lovers who usually go to online file-swapping networks to share and download music. The new site will be paying a part of its advertising earnings with the record companies. And in spite of being free, the site does carry copy protections.

“We believe it will be a very powerful alternative to the pirate sites,” maintained Joe Mohen, chairman and founder of New York-based SpiralFrog Inc. “With SpiralFrog you know what you’re getting … there’s no threat of viruses, adware or spyware.”

In SpiralFrog, users have to register and log on to the site at least one a month, failing which the content locks up and can’t be played. This move is basically to top members from posting copies of the material they attained from SpiralFrog.

Various details including age, gender and ZIP code need to be entered during the registration process. This information decides as to what kind of ads the users see when they are logged on the site.

What’s more, reviews and info on the artists also appears on SpiralFrog’s site.

During launch, the new online music service was offering over 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos for download. Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group is where a major portion of the content comes from and they are interestingly the only big name that has licensed music and videos to SpiralFrog. In addition there is music and video material from other independent record labels too.

According to Mohen, the site expects to have more than 2 million tracks over the next several months.

At SpiralFrog, downloads cannot be burned to a CD, but they can be transferred to dozens of digital music players. Sadly, the content does not work on Apple’s Macintosh computers or iPods.

The downloads cannot be copied to more than two portable music players or compatible mobile phones at one time.

Though critics had argued that SpiralFrog will never see the light of the day, the online music service has finally proved all of them wrong. After the action that the recording industry has taken against thousands of computer users for doing so in recent years, SpiralFrog could be a bright ray of hope for the recording industry!