Picture this, you just bought a spanking new 30 Gig MP3 player, and finished transferring your entire music collection on it, but guess what - it’s still half empty! Instead of letting that extra space go to waste - How about filling it up with free music? Well, here are 5 places you can start:
1. Free Classical Music
On Wikipedia you will find a gigantic list of classical music downloads which are in the public domain, or shared by the commons law. Get songs from all your favourite composers from Bach to Beethoven here.
The drawback though is that the files are in .Ogg format, which may not be the most popular or widely supported file standard. If you cannot play it on your desktop, Wikipedia has some tips to help you along.
2. Music Blogs
What I like about music blogs is that they often talk about the story behind the song or artist in a personable manner rather than just offering up a link to a song. Here are some of of my favourites - all of which contain songs you can download.
- Womenfolk - Women in music (includes big names like Shawn Colvin)
- Funky 16 Corners - Old time Blues
- Aurgasm - World music
- Filles Sourires - French women in music
- Said the Gramophone - Jazz to Indie Rock
- Downtempo - Dance tracks
- Benn Loxo - African music
3. Free Itunes Music
If you have an Itunes account, these webpages aggregate all the free music tracks available for download on Itunes.
4. Creative Commons 365 Project
Dedicated to spreading the Creative Commons philosophy, Indieish is running a project where only one creative commons song is showcased everyday. This project has gained widespread acclaim on the web, and because of the one song limit - quality is rarely compromised.
5. MP3.com
Being the granddaddy of free legal music downloads, mp3.com has offered countless artists the chance to strut their stuff before the world. It still offers up one of the largest collections of free legal music to date.
If you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, you can always use the good old Google + Firefox route :)
[tags] music, download music, free music, mp3 [/tags]
November 20th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
may i suggest using mp3 aggregator to find more ‘legal’ downloads from music blogs such as The Hype Machine and elbo.ws?
November 25th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Thanks greenpeace, those are good sites as well :)
March 16th, 2007 at 9:57 am
An open invite for your readers to check out my music weblog. Mixes, Live Shows, Reviews, Interviews and Perspective Pieces on great artists from all over the world (both past and present!) - Ryan
March 28th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
You can get £15 of free iTunes at vpoints.co.uk , get points for a couple of free ofers and you’re there
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
Great tip :) But I’ve seem even better ones. Instead of one method, this post describes 4 perfectly legal way to mooch of free music from the internet:http://atunu.blogspot.com/2006/11/webs-best-joints-for-music-lovers.html
and who can forget the awesome radioblog hack: http://atunu.blogspot.com/2007/02/all-your-base-are-belong-to.html
August 26th, 2007 at 10:09 am
a great free download and podcast site is
free old time raio show downloads
September 16th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
You also can use google to search for anything you want…..
http://eric.torvinen.net/search.php
November 11th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
you could also just download illegally