Free Music – What It Is and Where To Get It

Hey everyone.

I decided to write this article in response to a question from a fellow user, “PunditStyle”.

“What is an easy way to find free music online?”

Alright then. This all depends on your version of “free.”

If by free, you mean free to download and use LEGALLY, then you have many different options. First, websites such as last.fm, pandora, idobi radio, and others will stream internet radio. You can pick stations based on types of music, bands, songs, and mix and match your favorites. Recently, I used last.fm to find new bands to listen to based on some of the ones I’m currently into. Last.fm is free and doesn’t require a download or an account to use. Pandora requires you to make a free account and there are limitations to how many songs you can skip over. Idobi allows you to download playlists which stream music online. There’s a new playlist every day, so there’s always something to listen to.

There are other options too. YouTube is a great site to try to find music on. Many songs can be found live, from concert videos. I’ve started listening to oldies through YouTube, bands such as the Beatles, Who, Pink Floyd, and Led Zepplin. YouTube’s copyright policies remove many songs however, so it’s annoying to find that something has been taken off the site. Another good site is Mixtape.me, co-created by Lifehacker’s Adam Pash (I believe). It lets you make playlists on the fly and listen on the go. Selection isn’t the biggest, but it’s still good and it’s not too hard to put a new song in the database because the site can search through SkeemR. If you pick something from SkeemR, it’ll be available in the database for the future. Limitations are based on the databases indexed, which aren’t the biggest. I couldn’t find Jack’s Mannequin, for example, in SkeemR, to add a new song.

Finally, we have Muziic and Spotify. Muziic lets you stream songs from YouTube completely legally. Spotify is a similar sort of program, but it has an internal database and a HUGE selection as well. I used Spotify at the start and I was very impressed by it. You can hardly tell that it was buffering, and everything was just so quick and snappy. It has limited options, but a lot of songs.

Also, you can go to different websites and download free music. Amazon has a Free MP3 Store to check out. There are other sites as well, Google will point you in the right direction. This music is very often not well known, but there’s still some cool music out there.

That’s the legal side. The illegal side next. We don’t promote going down this path, we’re just sharing information that is freely available.

There are programs that can download music. Limewire and Frostwire are examples.

Coda.fm, Demonoid, Mininova, and other torrent sites have full albums and hot singles from many many artists to download, using a BT client (uTorrent) or BTaccel.

Warez-bb.org and other warez forums offer downloads of albums and singles through FTP and HTTP connections.

Sites like mp3raid.com offer music downloads via a search engine.

Programs like Tubemaster and websites like the youtube converter take youtube videos and make them into mp3 format for listening.

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So there you have it. The quick legal and illegal sides of music hunting. Please, keep it clean so we don’t get in trouble. =)

Enjoy!

Voltaire.