Finding Free Music in 2009

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Finding Free Music in 2009
(2009/10/12)

I keep two sets of music in my music library.

One is my sets is my collection of CD's, albums. and basically anything I have purchased over the years.

The other is what I call my "radio mix". This is a large collection of freely available music, generally licensed as creative commons, or under a plethora of alternative licensing arrangements. Some of the music come from bands doing free releases of singles.

My "radio mix" is music I play by genre. I have created a large number of what I call my personal radio stations, to fit whatever mood I am in and whatever style of music I want to hear.

Here are a number of my current sources for late 2009.

Jamendo

Jamendo at http://www.jamendo.com/en/ is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses.

Reverb Nation

Reverb Nation at http://www.reverbnation.com/ is another good site and recently Microsoft did a promotion with them to give away 1000 free songs which is still active as of the time this article was written. The only catch is the Microsoft logo on the cover art.

Legal Torrents

Legal Torrents at http://www.legaltorrents.com/ has a collection of music distributed for "Net Labels".

Last.fm

Last.fm at http://www.last.fm/ offers lots of free music downloads. Odd thing with this site is that a number of tunes were missing the genre tag so I had a bit of work to do when adding them to my radio mix.

Other Sources

There are lots of other places too. I have seen free downloads at Apple Itunes and at Amazon.com. Archive.org has an audio library at http://www.archive.org/details/audio with over 200,000 free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows.

Last Word

Remember that lot of this free music is the artists way of self-promotion -- so if you really like a song or album, consider supporting the artist and buying a copy from them.

Tags: Music

Brad Trupp