Preface
If you use any of the big three online music stores (iTunes, Amazon, and eMusic), you may be aware that each of them has a section where they give away free music.
You may not be aware that that is the tip of the iceberg.
I download approximately 11,000 songs per year for free without infringing any copyrights (“pirating” music, as the RIAA would call it). I list each of these sources as free and legal on one or more of these grounds:
- They explicitly say that the songs they give away or link to are free and legal. (Example: Largehearted Boy.)
- They link directly to artist, label, promotion-company, or music-store websites (so you're really getting the MP3 directly from a person or company who certainly is authorized to give it away). (Example: Largehearted Boy.)
- They are a music distribution service where artists and labels upload the music and set the price themselves. (Examples: Amie Street, Bandcamp, SoundCloud.)
- They're high-enough profile that they would have gotten in legal and/or reputation trouble by now if they didn't have permission to give away some of the songs they give away, or if they didn't have permission to do so for free. (Examples: Pitchfork, Spinner.)
There are some sources that I know about but don't use for one reason or another. I have created a separate section for these below.
Many sources, and seemingly free music in general, skew towards indie rock. I like finding sources that don't; I would like to have more variety in my sources, as I have eclectic tastes.
I welcome suggestions for more sources of free and legal music. My email address is on the front page.
Other and retired sources
“Uncertain authorization” means I'm not certain that the site is distributing songs with permission. Most of these have an easier-to-ask-forgiveness-than-permission policy, usually stated as “songs are up for X weeks and may not be available after that”, optionally coupled with “if you're the copyright holder and would like a song of yours taken down, contact …”.
Such sources post whatever songs they feel deserve attention, without any particular regard for what the artist or label want to give away. They mean well, certainly, so I don't mean to demonize them; this isn't a blacklist. I choose not to follow those sources because I want to see how many songs I can download that are distributed with the permission of the artist and/or label. If you are not so strict, then feel free to hit every one of those links.
This list is mainly so you know what sources I already know about, so you can avoid suggesting one of them to me. If a source isn't in the above list or in this one, then I don't know about it and may want to.
- Deutsche Welle's Beethoven and Classical Masterpieces podcasts: The latter has stopped updating, and the former switched away from a single-work-per-episode-with-nothing-else-that-couldn't-be-cropped-out format. You may find some of the archived content worth downloading, though.
- The Free Music Archive: The quality of the music posted here ranges from “pretty good” to “does not meet any useful definition of the word ‘music’”. Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law meant that most of what I encountered here was the latter. Some genres are worse than others. The other problem is that there's a lot of music here, and I didn't feel like trawling through it all (particularly given the former problem). I would like to see some sort of “best of the Free Music Archive” that only links to the good stuff.
- The Hype Machine: Aggregator of thousands of MP3 blogs. Most post with uncertain authorization.
- Insound: Music store with “over 5000 free MP3s” as of this writing. I don't follow this source because Largehearted Boy and Chromewaves generally link to the MP3s as they come out, so I find out about them anyway. (Thanks to Colin Barrett for suggesting this one.)
- Jamendo: No reason; I simply haven't dived into it yet.
- KCRW's Today's Top Tune and KEXP's Song of the Day: Too many duplicates with other indie-rock sources (such as LHB), which generally provided the duplicated songs at higher bit rates. Additionally, KCRW's songs have (or used to have) borked tags, with the artist name in the title tag and the title missing.
- MBV and member sites (particularly Fluxblog and Said the Gramophone): Uncertain authorization. The two member sites that do link to official/authorized downloads, Largehearted Boy and Chromewaves, don't include those in the MBV feed. (Chromewaves sometimes included up to a couple per post, but rarely the whole post.) Additionally, MBV has/had near-total overlap with LHB and Chromewaves; I had lots of duplicates between them.
- MPR The Current Song of the Day
: Unsubscribed because all songs are (re)encoded at a mere 128 kbps and nearly all songs end up dupes sooner or later. I get enough music from other sources that this isn't worth it anymore.
- Newgrounds Audio Portal: I couldn't find an audio-only feed. I don't like having to remember to check a source periodically.
- Pitchfork: Mostly because they don't have a separate free-songs feed, although Spinner doesn't either, and I created a Yahoo! Pipe to solve that problem with Spinner. Another problem is that their field is indie rock, which is well-trodden ground—I'd probably rack up a lot of duplicates. Chromewaves sometimes links to Pitchfork-hosted (and Spinner-hosted, for that matter) songs worth downloading, so I feel like I'm covered here.
- RCRD LBL: The last time I looked at their site, their free downloads required going through a Flash movie, which doesn't let me use my download manager software (which is important to me, as I keep my music collection organized, and anything that doesn't let me use my download manager impedes that).
- Stereogum: Too much overlap with other sources, especially MBV (indeed, it often seemed like they simply reposted the MBV MP3s with fixed-up tags). Its main usefulness used to be a permanent archive of every MP3 they'd ever posted; they remodeled recently (as of 2010-03), and I'm not sure whether their current archive goes back to 2006 like the old one did.
- You Ain't No Picasso: Uncertain authorization.
