SpiralFrog today launched its free music downloads service, whereby users in the United States and Canada can sign up for a free account and then chose from roughly 800,000 music tracks and 3,500 music videos to download. The catch? All media downloaded via SpiralFrog is ad-supported and can't be burned to CDs. Interestingly, most of the media is being provided by Universal, the largest record label in the world, after it declined to renew its contract with iTunes. As a result of this, none of Universal's music will be playable on Apple's iPods, presumably because Universal is feeling a little sour towards Apple. Joe Mohen, SpiralFrog's founder, said the following:

We believe [SpiralFrog] will be a very powerful alternative to the pirate sites, with SpiralFrog you know what you're getting ... there's no threat of viruses, adware or spyware.

The company hopes to have over two million tracks available within the next few months, and it's worth taking a look at the service if you listen to much music, even if only to see if you like a song or not. Unfortunately if you don't live in the USA or Canada you cannot use the service, although you can sign up to be kept informed about how the service is progressing in your country.