Music Technology in Education

After years of hype, Spiral Frog makes its’ debut today beginning a whole new chapter in the digital music revolution - or at least that’s what Spiral Frog execs would like you to think. The new iTunes contender has a whole new way of doing business. In an effort to harness the millions of P2P music pirates, Spiral Frog is a service that offers FREE downloadable music (the current catalog has over 770,000 tunes available). The music is supported completely by advertising. In a review by Eliot Van Buskirk over at Wired.com, Van Buskirk takes you on a tour of the features of Spiral Frog as well as its shortcomings. They include:

• Sorry Mac users - you can’t play
• Easy registration - free downloads
• Attention Firefox Users - WMP Plugin in required - no other browsers while your listening please
• Handy Download Manager Tool
• Hope you like the Universal Catalog - there’s not a whole lot else
• Limited selection will hold it back - iTunes offers more than 6 million tracks

So all of you PC people, check out Spiral Frog while you can. I hope that it sticks around for a long time and that Mac users can partake in the taking. I think that the idea of ad-supported downloading is very interesting, and just might be a solution to the rampant illegal downloading that occurs everyday. I look forward to a Mac version soon. Until then, I’ll keep using iTunes, and I’ll wait to hear reactions from my PC friends.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.