I logged onto the Spokane Public Library's new free music download service, Freegal, yesterday -- and it lived up to expectations.

It contains 500,000 songs from the Sony music archives. City library card holders can download -- and keep -- three songs per week.

It will take me months to thoroughly browse the offerings, but it contains just about the entire Bruce Springsteen catalog, the entire Simon and Garfunkel catalog and lots of the Frank Sinatra catalog.

And those are just the S's.

A quick rule of thumb: Artists on a Sony label or any of its affiliates (including the mighty Columbia Records label), will probably be there.

To access it, you must have a Spokane Public Library card and the PIN number that you already use to log onto the library's website. If you don't have a PIN number, you'll have to go to any branch and get one.

Classical music fans might be particularly pleased. The site contains lots of outstanding classical selections. But you might have to download them movement by movement.

See the original post below for more details.

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