Spiralfrog, a free ad-supported Web-based music service, announced a licensing agreement with Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, to make Sony's collection available on the SpiralFrog Web site, MediaPost reports.

The idea of ad-supported, free music downloading is interesting. But as PC World recently reported in a test of the service, SpiralFrog is much more trouble than its worth. Blogger Tom Spring found that the service "delivered far more error messages than music tracks" to him, and only worked correctly for about 10 minutes.

The idea is that you watch ads in exchange for free music downloads that you can listen to on your computer or on a mobile device. But you also have to check in and see more ads at least once a month, or all your downloaded tracks become playable. Worse, the service doesn't even seem to work right. In other words, it's yet more restrictive DRM, and it's even more complicated than the usual snafus.

It should be clear to everyone by now that consumers are not all that interested in "renting" music tracks. Even the subscription services--which are actually a good deal, letting you listen to millions of major-record-label songs for about $15 a month--have failed to capture the public's imagination to date.

Sony Music To Be Made Available On SpiralFrog [MediaPost]