Jumping Back Into SpiralFrog’s Pond: “You Can Download So Much Whitesnake”

Yesterday, an Idolator operative took a spin through the ad-supported download service SpiralFrog and gave us his reactions. Well, today he IMed me with two pieces of news: first, that Monster Magnet was on the service, and second, that the site was “fucking up gloriously right now.” Which meant, of course, that I asked him for more information on how things were going for him today:

The search engine is for shit–I searched for the band Death, so every single band with ‘death’ in the title comes up. So i have to sort through all that, which isn’t helped by the site being really slow. I also typed ‘MIA’ without the periods–I’m a busy man–and it gave me a lot of nonsense. But I’m also finding it hard to complain when i’m rocking out so hard to ‘Strutter,’ which I found and downloaded with no problems.

One of the things that I guess has to do with ad views is how they make you initiate every individual download–even if you download an entire album you have to click ‘download next’ for each track, and sometimes type in that XB2J stuff [Ed. note: aka the “captcha” anti-spam control], so you can’t set it to download stuff and walk away. You tend to get conflicts when you have it running in multiple browser tabs.

As I said last time, there are misnomers about what’s actually available–like Metallica and Oasis, it’s unauthorized stuff, not real albums. But you can still get the entire velvet underground catalog, so that’s worth something. And it looks, at least on my browser, like they removed the ‘available downloads’ icon, so you’re guessing blindly if they’re going to have music to get or not. The fact that the pages exist for artists they don’t have is kind of annoying; there’s no worthwhile content on those pages other than AMG database stuff.

But really, that’s what this feels like Spiralfrog should be–the next generation of the All Music Guide’s sampling system, just with full songs. Because since the downloads are only good for 30 days, it’d be easy to target them at prospective buyers browsing biographies and whatnot.

Um, I think that’s all I got at the moment, unless there’s questions … OK, fuck everything, this is the best site ever, i can listen to ‘Regulate’ on loop for another 30 days.

After a few IMs where he was clearly enjoying “Regulate,” we had him check out the video offerings:

Christ, the video page just starts playing “Ayo Technology.” No thank you. I just took my headphones off because the video will keep playing while the site loads my search.

Tried to play the “Thunderkiss” video and i got a 404 error–oh wait, i could just go to YouTube!

I think videos on here are going to be useless. I’m still trying to load the video–I’d be to the second chorus on YouTube by now.

(time passes)

I’ve gotten a 404 error 4 times now, but at least i can download Xasthur songs. My current search is about to crack the two minute mark. I would search for Whitesnake, but I guess I have to take my searches really seriously, since it takes upwards of three minutes to do each one.

(more time passes)

Oh shit–you can download so much Whitesnake.

SpiralFrog [Official site] Earlier: SpiralFrog: It’s Alive, And It’s Kinda Buggy