Find Free Music Online (Legally)
You want to get in on music downloading, but you are queasy about most peer-to-peer clients. You're not sure that such downloading is fair to artists or record companies. Even if you're one of those, there is still a great deal of free and legal music online, especially if your tastes are offbeat and adventurous.
First of all, the Big Apple of online music, Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, posts a free song every week. One recent tune was "Never Never" from the soul duo Brick & Lace. OK, maybe the iTunes songs won't be your cup of tea every week.
So, where else is there to go? According to a recent article in Playlist magazine, Sony and Columbia are both putting streaming tracks from new artists online. Smaller labels such as Matador Records and Sub Pop Records post MP3s online for downloading.
A rich vein to mine is The Internet Archive’s Audio Archive, which has a massive library of live music from hundreds of bands. Entire concerts are available, as well.
If you're Bit Torrent savvy, go to etree.org to find music from jam bands, obscure punk groups and others in a losslessly-compressed, downloadable format. Playlist notes many of these files are in different formats and may require some manipulation to convert them to an iTunes-friendly format.
What other sources for free, legal downloads are there out there, SMT'ers? Let the rest of us know your secret locations.
Comments
Find free food at grocery store sample trays! Seriously, who goes looking for music using cost as the primary criterion?
Ruckus (ruckusnetwork.com) offers free (and legal) downloads of over 2.7 million tracks of music. This is ad-supported and offered to college students.
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