When you read about all the budding Internet sites you don’t often hear the words “Free” and “Legal” in the same breath. You have sites like iTunes which are certainly legal – but not free. Likewise you have sites like Seeqpod, Napster and others that have tried to provide free music without the agreement of the legal owners of that music. But with a little bit of research, you can find a wide array of music on the Internet that is legally obtainable just by asking! Check out these 8 sites to get a feel for what types of free music are available.
Amazon ♥
Most people are surprised to hear this, but typically Amazon has 700-800 songs available for free downloading. As i write this you can download the just released Major Tom by the Shiny Toy Guns, Ninth Place by Buckwheat Zydeco and Hurt Feelings from the Flight of the Concords. Many of the 700+ songs are usually pretty unknown but on any given day you can find some new releases and around the December holiday season they always have a great collection of holiday classics.
Artistserver ♥♥♥
ArtistServer is a social media site with a focus on independent music. They are one of the older sites having launched in 2001 under their former name ElectronicScene.com. In 2005 they evolved to include all genres of music and took on the name ArtistServer, though they still focuses mainly on independent music. There are over 8,000 songs available to listen to on-demand or download as. The website also has some unique elements with free MP3 ringtones and a very lively and loya; community in the forums. ArtistServer is a worthy destination in the discovery of new music.
ccMixter ♥♥
ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want. While I only give it two hearts it is clearly a niche site. If you’re into sampling, remixing and mash-ups than this is the free music site for you!
The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is a platform for collaboration between WFMU and a group of fellow curators, including KEXP, dublab, KBOO, ISSUE Project Room, and CASH Music. To quote them “Every mp3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by outdated copyright law.” So while you get their opinion on copyright law – whether they like it or not they are obeying it.
Jamendo – ♥♥♥♥
Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses. The site has more than 19,000 albums available. Not only that, but it is a darn good website. The site is easy to use, easy to search, all the music is tagged, the community is active with thousands of reviews. The ability to look at music by artist, by album, by genre, by top 100 most listened to is what I love. And, in a very positive way they constantly sneak in ways to encourage you to try out a new artist or song.
Here are two more words “legal” and “torrents” that you thought you would hear together. LegalTorrents discovers and distributes high quality open-license (Creative Commons) digital media. They host creative content in its entirety (no 30 second partial clips), ensure fast, reliable downloads, and enable users to directly sponsor Content Creators and their work. The site is still in beta, but it is open to the public. The selection is really limited at the moment – but it would be cool to see this site take off!
This is clearly a niche site as it is dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form. Okay – if you started laughing than skip the rest of this. But for may of us game music is more than just background blips and beeps. The site has over 1500 remixes at this writing with a surprising number from professional-level composers. Indeed Capcom commissioned OC ReMix members to create the soundtrack for an update to Street Fighter II. This is a love it or hate it site – either you are amazed I included this site at all or you are astonished that it only got a one heart ranking!
Soundclick ♥♥
SoundClick has been live since 1997 and has a huge and growing collection with over 2 million full-length tracks available; many for free download. Streaming audio is also used for free videos and radio stations. While the music selection is great, there are features about the site that bug me. Te site layout is confusing at times – certainly not intuitive in places. Not all the music is free to download and the thing that makes that tough is that it is hard to look for only free music. The site claims over 3.4 million members and 70+ million monthly page views.
Traffic
These are not fly by night sites. You can see Soundclick.com is registering some impressive and steady tracking. My favorite Jamendo is still pretty small – but you can see how positive press has spiked their traffic. The same is happening to Freemusicarchive with their recent spike. Hey – none of these are moving the once upon a time traffic of Napster – but neither are they are they playing the siren song that will attract flocks of lawyers!
Try these sites out for yourself. I hope you enjoy the exploration and come back and share your thoughts!
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