SpiralFrog Crawls Out from Under its Lily Pad

SpiralFrog, an ad supported music downloading site, officially launched today with approximately 800,000 songs and 3,500 music videos available to download to media players, and the company said it will add more content every day. All is well in the world of SpiralFrog.

Well, maybe.

It’s been a tough road for SpiralFrog since it initially got traction for its ad supported music sharing model through a deal with Universal Music Group. It wasn’t long before things went wrong when the company failed to sign any additional major labels and then many executives and sales staffers left in December. Still, it’s up now, and company executives are touting it as a piracy-free means of downloading music, since a share of its advertising revenue is provided to publishers. It also intends to bring users to its service by providing additional artist bios, reviews, discography and album art, among other rich content features, according to the company. All of which is meant to make the site a “Web-based music experience” rather than a music downloading portal.

But on the other hand, SpiralFrog will play on Windows PCs running XP and Vista, and will download songs to “up to two portable music players or music-enabled phones that support Windows Media DRM,” it said. Which means, as many Apple iPod users know, it requires using WMA files with DRM software which won’t work on the Apple devices. So there goes 70 percent of the portable music player market. And there’s even some question that SpiralFrog will work on Microsoft’s own Zune player.

Yup, it looks like the frog has an uphill battle ahead of it.