If a patron needs to re-download a song, there is a link to Recent Downloads on the menu bar on the front page that will show them all of their downloads over the past two weeks. These songs can be downloaded a total of two extra times.
The FAQ, also found on the menu bar, offers general guidance and information about using the site. Patrons can find short instructions here on how to download the songs to their computers, transfer files to iTunes, and finding and using the App for their Apple and Android products.
Searching the website is admittedly not the easiest thing in the world. Though there are multiple ways to search, they all tend to return results by the track, so a simple artist search can be clogged with hundreds of tracks from similar sounding artists before you find the artist you are looking for. The site also offers A to Z artist and Genre browsing options, but these also require paging through hundreds of results.
For example, the pictures above are from an artist search and a browse search for the artist “Journey”. As you can see, they are not very helpful. Your best bet if you are having trouble finding an artist that you know for sure is on the site is to use the Advanced Search feature and search by at least two different fields, such as Artist and Song.
Clicking on the artist name will bring you to a page with all available albums by that artist.
As most of the site is comprised of Sony label artists, it’s often easier to suggest to patrons that they look at a list of those artists rather than letting them get discouraged by plugging in names of artists who most likely aren’t available. The major Sony label is RCA Records, so a quick visit to the artist page of their website (http://www.rcarecords.com/artists) will give patrons a good visual representation of the more popular music available. Another good resource for this is actually Wikipedia, which has lists of artists signed to both RCA records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RCA_Records_artists) and Sony (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_Music_artists). Just be aware that these are lists of every artist who has ever been signed to these labels, so some of the artists listed may not be currently signed to Sony and thus not available on Freegal. That’s a distinct minority of these lists, however, and they are very good resources to suggest to patrons who are having trouble navigating the site.
