Woo hoo! I was a long time subscriber to Rhapsody’s music service until last night. My wife and I are getting serious about eliminating all debt, so we’ve canceled a lot of services like TV, gym membership and Rhapsody. But then this morning I finally received my invitation to join the beta of SpiralFrog.com! I’ve been waiting over a year for this and it came at the perfect time.

SpiralFrog is a legal alternative to pirate file-sharing sites, providing a comprehensive listing of artist information, over 700,000 songs to download at no cost – with more added weekly – videos and music discovery tools.

They’re able to provide FREE legal music downloads because of the support from advertisers, so I was kinda expecting to hear 10-second ads at the beginning or end of each track, but was pleasantly surprised to hear that wasn’t the case. Instead, it looks like they ask you fill out a survey and check out some advertisers every 30 days in order to continue your service and renew the DRM licenses on your downloaded media. Granted, SpiralFrog’s music library is considerably smaller than Rhapsody’s, but SprialFrog’s press releases shows agreements made with most of the top record labels in the industry, so given some time SpiralFrog might catch up.

Unfortunately, SpiralFrog didn’t give me any free invitations to pass out. If you want to join the free legal music downloading service, you’ll have to sign up at SpiralFrog.com and wait in queue for your invitation email to show up.

[tags]SpiralFrog, Rhapsody[/tags]

Posted on August 4, 2007