Downloads For Free! Legally! Finally!

What up what up...music can finally be downloaded FOR FREE without the implications of an expensive legal battle for every song you download illegally. Spiralfrog.com launched today, the first ad supported free music site. Basically Spiralfrog takes the money they get from advertisers on their site, and gives a portion of it back to a music company to pay for the royalties/other legal fees associated with letting people download their songs (genius). Right now the site is backed by Universal music, and has an initial offering of about 700,000 songs... (How many can you fit on an iPod, again?)

Anyway, I think the idea's pretty sweet and it will be interesting to see how many people catch onto free downloading fever. I guess talks are in the works for a similar site called Qtrax, which will have the support of all four major music players (Universal, BMI, EMI, and Sony BMG) and be able to offer a catalog starting with about 30 million songs. I think Spiralfrog is just the beginning of a beautiful era of free music for all..

Read more @ AdAge ...