If you wanted the day when you can download free music to come, I can tell you that it’s close. But don’t expect too much. There are nasty surprises coming with the news.

SpiralFrog, a new music download station hopes to become the leader in music download. For this it had signed an agreement with Universal Music Group to allow the users to download music via SpiralFrog’s advertising-supported service.

The good news is that all the music will be yours for FREE. You read it right. SpiralFrog will offer the users its free web-based service and the ability to legally download music by many of the world’s most popular and award-winning artists.

“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” said Robin Kent, SpiralFrog’s CEO. “SpiralFrog will offer those consumers a better experience and environment than they can get from any pirate site.”

The bad news is that it’s not exactly free. It will still be under DRM “jurisdiction”. Digital rights management will be included with all content, with the content being locked in by Microsoft’s WMA packaging. This will allow copying to portable devices labeled with the “PlaysForSure” logo.

This means that you can’t burn the music you download on a CD.

“We want to provide the best environment for everyone - our partners and the recording artists, as well as consumers,” Kent said. “Piracy continues to be one of the biggest issues facing the music industry where illegal file sharing and unauthorized CD burning are the prime means of music piracy. Digital rights protection will help us combat piracy and provide peace of mind for the record labels and the artists.”

This solution is still better than the one offered by iTunes. You will be restricted to write the songs on a CD but at least you won’t have to pay for it.

“Offering legally-authorized audio and video downloads in an advertising-supported environment works, as our business model is based on sharing our income streams from that advertising with our content partners like Universal.”

Combining free music download with Microsoft’s current nightmare,FairUse4WM, you get a dangerous situation.

According to the press release, the ads will be “non-intrusive” and “contextually relevant” - a similar description could be applied to advertising such as Google AdWords.

SpiralFrog plans to use a “radio broadcast” model, where the ads will be placed before and between content, so that they cannot be skipped. I think that Yahoo is doing the same with Yahoo LAUNCHcast.

In December 2006, SpiralFrog will start its public beta so get ready to download some music.