The SpiralFrog home page

The nice folks at SpiralFrog sent me an invitation to the beta, so for the last few days I have been playing around on the ad-supported music download site. SpiralFrog allows users to download protected WMA files at no cost. Since the files are WMA, SpiralFrog will not work with iTunes. Tracks may be transfered to compatible portable devices, but I have not yet dug up my old Sansa MP3 player so the files I download have not made it past my hard drive. Downloaded tracks go in a SpiralFrog folder (mine is in my standard "My Music" folder along with everything else) and can be played on any music player compatible with protected WMA (I used both WIndows Media Player and the Slacker player).

In a nutshell, I think SpiralFrog is an average product that misses its greater potential. With some tweaking I think it could carve out a nice little niche. SpiralFrog does nothing wrong per se -- it lives up to its goal of offering free music to users -- but it feels half-finished. While the site design is clean and simple, it is also bland. The site currently offers about 700,000 tracks, but SpiralFrog's shallow facade offers no hint of such depth. Navigation, layout and search functions are poor compared to those of other download sites. If price dictates user experience, then you definitely get what you pay for.

The music is not organized very well. Imagine walking into a store and seeing only a few items on display. There are more items, but they are in an adjacent warehouse, arranged alphabetically in immense stacks. That's what browsing around SpiralFrog felt like. The "artists" page reveals an alphabetized list of names with about 200 listings to a page. (I was annoyed with all the blank space on a typical page. Too much scrolling is required to browse around.) Users can jump to any letter in the alphabet -- good for a small, brick-and-mortar record store, bad for an online store with a huge catalog. The "new releases" page displays a similar lack of care.

The SpiralFrog artist page

Downloading songs, which requires the simple installation of a download manager, is an easy but time-consuming process. The download manager is so basic even a beginner will now how to use it. An album must be downloaded one song at a time, and download times are long. I timed a download of the 5:06-long "Rave Down" by Swervedriver at 88 seconds.

The SpiralFrog business model is built upon the assumption that users will view the site's ads. How much time will actually be spent on the site can vary dramatically. For example, a user does not have to view ads for every download. Songs are downloaded one at a time, but I did not spend time looking at the ads while downloading an album. After I clicked the "download next track" button, I toggled to another browser rather than spend 88 seconds (or whatever) looking at whatever ad was underneath the download manager. A few minutes later I would toggle back to SpiralFrog, select the next song on the album, and then toggle to another browser as the song downloaded. While downloading an entire album can take well over ten minutes, much of that time can be put to good use through multi-tasking.

Continue reading "Hands On With SpiralFrog" »