I got this email from free, ad-supported site SpiralFrog yesterday.

"Please renew your FREE membership to SpiralFrog by following this link:

www.spiralfrog.com/membership/renew.aspx

Our renewal process is easy. Every 30 days, simply give us two minutes of your time and complete a short seven-question survey that'll help us better understand your needs.

If you decide not to renew your membership, you will no longer be able to download songs and video from SpiralFrog, and the music you have already downloaded will eventually cease to play. (Please note that if you decide to renew your membership at any time, all the music and videos you’ve previously downloaded will immediately become playable once more.)

Maybe I knew going in that SpiralFrog required these small, reoccurring time commitments (and forgot) but I have no desire to jump through this hoop every month (especially since I look at SpiralFrog only out of curiosity).

On the bright side, the survey is fairly pain-free; SpiralFrog asks things like, "How would you describe the downloading process?" and "How often was the music you were searching for available for download?" In this particular instance, however, the second page of the survey could not be found and I wasn't able to renew my (free) subscription.

Annoyances such as these -- the need to manually renew my subscription, error pages -- are going to severely hinder SpiralFrog's growth. Ease of use will not be merely important, it will be everything. A company's value proposition is lacking if it asks customers to pass up easier (albeit illegal) options, make do without three of the four majors and pesters them every 30 days.