SpiralFrog is an ad-supported Web site. We sell ads on our pages to advertisers who want to talk to you. And we give the majority of that advertising revenue to the music publishers and labels who own the music you're downloading.

Most of our song and video downloads take a short, consistent amount of time to complete, during which we encourage you to keep discovering new areas of the Web site. Every page you visit allows us to serve more advertising, thus building the revenues we can pay to the content creators.

We do NOT ask you for a credit card. But we do ask for your time and attention. And, for that, we thank you…

As of now, we have over 800,000 songs available for you to download. You may download as many of these songs as you like – no limit. We are adding more songs and videos every week, so if you don’t see your favorite band, check back often to see the latest updates.

We also have music videos that you can watch on the site, or download to your computer. Although the videos stream on the site in low resolution (300Kbps), you may download videos in both low and high resolution (1,000Kbps). Please note that, if you select to download the higher resolution videos, it will take a little longer to download as the average file size is four times larger than the average song file.

To download songs and videos, and to watch streaming videos at SpiralFrog, you do need to register for membership. But it's easy...

As part of the registration process, we ask you for some very basic information – your email address, age, gender and your Zip Code/Province/Territory code, and we’ll ask you to make up a user name and password. Once you’ve submitted the completed registration form, we’ll send you an email containing a link back to our site to confirm your registration.

Once you’re back at the SpiralFrog Web site, we ask you to install a small application – less than 2MB – which we call the Download Manager. This software works with your browser, allowing you to download songs and videos from SpiralFrog.

To download songs at the SpiralFrog Web site, you will need to be using a computer platform that runs either Windows XP or Windows Vista.

You will also need to have Windows Media Player Version 10 or 11 installed on your computer. To download Windows Media Payer Version 11 free from Microsoft, click here.

We provide links in the appropriate places if you’ve forgotten your password.

At your request, we’ll send an email to the address we have on record for you including a new password. You can then change this password to whatever you like once you’re back on the SpiralFrog site.

At this time, you can only register to be a member of SpiralFrog, and download songs and video from our site, if you access the site from the United States of America or Canada.

We plan to provide the SpiralFrog service in selected countries in the future. Please check this Web site for news of upcoming releases.

To keep downloading songs and videos, and playing all that you've downloaded, you must renew your SpiralFrog membership every 30 days.

The renewal process is very simple – we ask you to sign in with your password and email address, to type in some slightly-distorted squiggly letters so that we know you’re a real person, and we ask you to answer some questions about yourself.

The information you give us during the renewal process will never be used on an individual basis, but will help us aggregate information we provide to our advertisers. (Such as, "Over 36% of our audience intends to purchase a car in the next six months.") This, in turn, helps us to better target our advertising, thus increasing our advertising revenues, and providing the content creators with more cash for the songs and videos that you get to download at no cost.

A couple of things happen if you don’t return to the SpiralFrog Web site and renew your membership every 30 days.

On Day 31, you will no longer be able to download songs or videos from our site, but the music you have already downloaded will continue to play on your computer and portable player for another 30 days.

However, if you choose not to renew your membership after 60 days, on Day 61 all the songs and videos you have downloaded from SpiralFrog will no longer play on your computer or portable player.

At any time, you can renew your membership – even after Day 61 – and your music licenses will be restored, and your music will be good for another 30 days. You will NOT need to re-download your files.

The songs you download from SpiralFrog are protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM), and are programmed with a license to play only for the period that you maintain your membership to our Web site. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a requirement from the record labels and publishers who license the music to us. However, if you keep your SpiralFrog membership up to date, you won’t even notice the built-in DRM as we’ve tried hard to keep it in the background as much as possible.

As your membership approaches the end of each 30-day period, we will send you an email at the address we have on record for you to remind you to renew. You can also see how many days you have left to your membership in the message located in the main navigation bar at the top left-hand corner of every page at SpiralFrog, along with a link to the renewal page.

Renewing your SpiralFrog membership will update the licenses to the song and video files on your computer. To keep the songs and videos playable on the portable device(s) you’ve transferred them to, you need to sync them up with your computer so that it can update the licenses.

But, since you'll probably be downloading music from SpiralFrog on a regular basis, and then transferring those songs to your portable device(s), this process should happen automatically. However, please note that you’ll need to sync up your portable device(s) with your computer at least once a month to keep them up-to-date with the licenses.

SpiralFrog updates its content and features just about every day, and every week of the year.

New albums in every genre are released each week, and you can find a full list of these in our New Releases section. If you’re looking for our selection of the best, go to the Home page and check out the New This Week section, our We Recommend selections, or the Buzz of the Day.

For music from exciting new and emerging artists you may not be familiar with yet, visit the Breakout Bands section.

If you know the category of music you like, click on the Genres link in the navigation bar at the top of each page. There you’ll be tempted by our Editor's Picks in each music category, plus links to hundreds of sub-categories where you can dig deeper for the songs you want.

Finally, if you know exactly what you’re looking for, there’s a search function at the top right of each page that allows you to search specifically by Song, Album, Artist/Group, or Video.

The simple answer is, “Not Yet!” But we’re working on it.

At this time, we have over 800,000 songs available for download, and we’re adding new songs every day, every week of the year.

The good news is that you can use the SpiralFrog Web site to find out information about every artist, album and song that’s out there – even if we don’t have those songs available for download at this time.

Built in to every artist, album, song, and video page, there is a Send to a Friend feature.

You can either copy the URL you see there and paste it into the IM or email you’re working on. Or you can click on the “Send To A Friend” button, and you’ll have everything you need to send a quick message to your friend.

You won’t actually be sending the song or video to your friend, just a link back to that page. But that’s all they’ll need, as they can quickly register and start downloading their own collection of music.

You download music from an album, song or video by clicking the Download icon associated with the song or video you want to download to your computer.

The song or video you have selected goes into the Download Manager (in the top right-hand corner of every page). However, before the download starts, you’ll have to do is type in the four lower-case letter code so that we know you’re a human being – and not some clever programmer writing scripts to steal this music and not give anything back to the content creators. (Please note that if the letters are a little too distorted to read, simply click on the “Click Here To Refresh” link, and we’ll serve you up some different letters that may be easier for you to read.)

You only have to type in the four-letter code the first time you download a song or video each time you visit our site.

You can see the progress of the download by the movement of the green spiraling status bar. Click the “Cancel” button if you’ve selected the wrong song to download.

While a song or video is downloading, you can keep visiting new pages – the Download Manager stays with you, showing you the progress of your download. You can keep clicking to download new songs and video, and they will simply go into the queue to download. Please note that if you want to delete a song or video from your video queue, click on the “Remove” button.

Most of the songs you’ll download at SpiralFrog take a short, consistent time to transfer from our Web site to your computer. And you can see the progress of the download in the Download Manager area in the top right-hand corner of every page of our Web site by monitoring the green status bar as it moves from left to right.

So, why does the green status bar sometimes keep spiraling, even though it's reached the far right-hand side? Could be for a number of reasons – but the most obvious is that it’s a long song, say, over six minutes long, or it's a video and the transfer simply takes longer. It could also be that your own bandwidth connection with us is not as fast as you'd like... but we can’t help you with that!

The simple answer is no.

We ask you to install our Download Manager application – that allows you to download songs and videos from our Web site – and this is thoroughly checked for any kind of virus before it is downloaded. You can easily remove the Download Manager using Add/Remove Programs applet should you no longer use the site.

In addition, we have a certificate assigned to SpiralFrog from VeriSign that allows us to sign our installation files as further evidence that the program files you’re transferring on to your computer are completely virus-free.

All music files you download from SpiralFrog are in a protected format that cannot carry viruses.

We enjoy your company, and don’t want you slinking off to make a cup of coffee while you’re downloading music!

Seriously, our goal is to pay the music publishers and labels a fair compensation for the songs and videos you download at no cost. That means that we want you enjoying every page of our Web site while you're downloading, and all the time allowing us to serve advertising messages about products we think you may want to know about.

As we give the majority of our ad revenue to the music owners who create the songs and videos you're downloading, you owe it to your favorite musicians to give us your time and attention!

When you’re installing the Download Manager, we ask you to select where you'd like us to download songs and videos on your computer. If you zip through the installation process (like we did!) and don't change the default settings, your songs and videos will be downloaded into the My Music subfolder in the My Documents folder on your computer. Your downloaded music will be placed in separate folders named for the Artist whose song and videos you're downloading.

Once the music files are downloaded successfully on to your computer, you can play the songs and video through your Windows Media Player, or any portable player or music-enabled phone that supports WMA files.

For example, if you regularly play music on your computer using the Windows Media Player, that's how you'll play the songs and videos you download from SpiralFrog. And it’s also how you'll transfer the music files to up to two portable devices.

SpiralFrog is compatible with portable music players and music phones that support Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM). Look out for devices that prominently display the “PlaysForSure” logo.

You can transfer the music files you download from SpiralFrog to up to two portable devices – a portable player and cell phone, for example. For the most part, simply treat our music exactly the same as you would any other music file on your computer, and follow the instructions you are provided by the manufacturer of the device you’re transferring the music to.

Please note that DRM-protected files must be “synchronized” with the target device using a program intended for this purpose. Simply copying the file will transfer the file, but not the license associated with the file – and the end result is that files copied in this manner are not playable on the portable device.

We recommend using the Windows Media Player Version 11 to transfer the songs from your computer to the portable music player.

Please remember that our music files only play if you continue to renew your monthly membership at SpiralFrog. If you renew every 30 days, all the music you download from SpiralFrog is good to go – however, you need to sync your portable devices every month as well in order to update the licenses on the songs you’ve transferred so they’ll play as well.

We're not compatible with these devices. However, the songs and videos you download from SpiralFrog will play on any computer platform capable of running Windows XP or Windows Vista, as well as all portable devices or cell phones that play WMA music files and have implemented the Windows DRM support.

Click on the following link for a list of compatible portable music players and cell phones. http://www.playsforsure.com/FindPortableDevices.aspx

To download songs at the SpiralFrog Web site, you will need to be using a computer platform that runs either Windows XP or Windows Vista.

You will also need to have Windows Media Player Version 10 or 11 installed on your computer. To download Windows Media Payer Version 11 free from Microsoft, click here.

During the installation process for the Download Manager, we will check your computer to make sure you have what’s required to download songs from SpiralFrog and suggest any additional software that you may need to install.

The SpiralFrog Web site works well with the following browsers: Internet Explorer Versions 6 and 7, and Firefox Versions 1.5 and 2.0.

As part of the registration process, you’ll be invited to install the Download Manager. This small software application – less than 2MB – allows you to transfer songs and videos from SpiralFrog to your computer.

To get technical, the Download Manager application is implemented as a Microsoft .Net application, and thus relies on the presence of the Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 or later to be on your computer. This comes bundled with Windows Vista and is preinstalled on most modern computers running Windows XP. However, should your computer for some reason not have .Net Framework, the set-up program for the SpiralFrog Download Manager will install .Net Framework 1.1 for you. (You don’t need to know if the .Net Framework is there or not as the set-up program will check this automatically.)

We use session cookies each time you’re online visiting SpiralFrog. We also use persistent cookies that stay on your computer after you’ve left our site so that we can make your experience more fun next time you visit as we already know your preferences.

If you delete the cookies on your computer, no problem, we simply won’t recognize you immediately next time you visit us and you’ll have to logon to let us know who you are.

If you click your browser’s Stop button while downloading a song or video, the Download Manager will continue its job and, even though the green spiraling status bar stops, your song or video will keep downloading. Simply refresh the page – or click to go to any other page on the SpiralFrog Web site – and you’ll see the download process has continued regardless.

If you try to visit the SpiralFrog Web site from more than one browser at a time – especially if you try to download songs from each browser at the same time – you’re going to experience problems.

To download songs from SpiralFrog, you’ve installed the Download Manager. This application allows you to download one song at a time – no matter how many browsers you have open on your desktop.

Please use one browser only when you’re downloading songs at SpiralFrog. Thank you.