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Download Free Music Legally, An Updated Guide

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:20:57 +0000

The Internet is full of possibilities to download free music legally. Free and legal, is not that tautological? Not necessarily, as you may stumble upon offers to download free music that are only free for users from a specific country. This guide however covers methods and services that allow or enable everyone to download free music. The guide has been divided into chapters that covers specific methods or services.

In Free Music Downloads, we cover music portals that offer direct downloads of free music. This is basically an update for the 2008 guide How To Increase Your Music Collection Free (And Legally).

Free Music Downloads

If you look at sites that offer free music downloads you notice that the majority hosts music by lesser known artists. I personally would see that as a chance, not a restriction. Sure, you won’t find the latest Take That or Madonna on those sites, but that does not necessarily mean that the music is of less quality, or less enjoyable.

One of the largest websites that offers free music downloads is Jamendo. The music portal, at the time of writing, hosts more than 300,000 music tracks, which are all freely available.

Even better, you do not even need an account to download full albums or songs. Downloads are provided directly or as legal music torrents that you can download in your Bittorrent software.

You should consider supporting those independent artists if you like the music. You can be sure that the money reaches them directly.

Alternatives:

CCMixter – Remixes licensed under Creative Commons.
ClearBits – Legal music torrents, check out the Netlabel Music category on site as well for more free music downloads.
Free Music Archive – Covers free music from all genres, no album downloads.
Live Music Archive – A section on Archive.org that hosts live music that you can freely download. This does include popular artists and bands.
Unsigned Band Web – Music from bands that have no record contract. Thousands of songs available.

Music Blogs

Another excellent source to download free music are music blogs. A good starting point is the website The Hype Machine which aggregates new music postings from many popular music blogs. You cannot download music directly on the website though but can follow links to the music blogs to do that there.

Below is a selection of music blogs that post direct music links. If you search the web you find many similar sites. A good starting point is the link section of the sites linked below, or a site like Hypem which acts as an aggregator.

Bottom of the glass – Regularly updated music blog with direct mp3 links
Faronheit – Chicago based music blog, regularly updated, direct music downloads.
MP3 Hugger – Daily free music downloads and reviews.
Sonic Masala – Another music blog, uploads music to file hosting sites.
Spinner – Music blog with free direct mp3 downloads and reviews.
The Music Ninja – Daily music updates.

Record Internet Radio

One of the easiest options to download free music is to record Internet radio. This is legal in most countries. Internet Radio has become a popular source to play music online in recent years thanks to the rise of broadband connections and flatrates. While you can only listen to one station at a time, you can record multiple, usually only limited by the speed of your Internet connection and the performance of the computer.

Many Internet Radio stations are now offering high quality audio streams, which should satisfy users who only listen to high quality music.

Probably the biggest usability issue is that you cannot pick a specific song or artist. You only pick a station based on genre or quality, and download random songs from it. Some tools, like Streamwriter make use of wishlists to reduce the randomness.

One of the best tools for recording Internet radio is Streamwriter. The free program comes with everything one would need to get started. It offers a channel list of Radio stations, abilities to record multiple radio stations at once, filters to only download music of a specific quality level and a wishlist to download songs that you really want.

Alternatives:

Phonostar – Record more than 6000 Internet radio stations.
Stripper – a StreamRipper frontend in Java.
Stream Harvester – stations need to be added manually.
Tapin Radio – simple music player and recorder

Convert Music Videos

Websites like YouTube host millions of music videos, uploaded officially by record companies and artists, or fans. The videos are automatically stored on your computer’s cache when you view them. You can convert the music videos into audio files with the help of programs. The core benefit of this method is that you can download and convert music selectively.

Fetch Mp3 is a web service that can be used to convert Youtube videos directly to mp3 music.
Gazzump – Online service to download from Youtube and convert to mp3.
Tubequeue – Windows software to download music from Youtube.

Closing Words

I have not included tools and services to download music from popular sites such as Last.fm, Grooveshark or Spotify. Tools exist to download music from these services, but it is questionable if it is legal to download music from those services.

Download Free Music With Multi-Platform Tool Pymaxe

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:06:53 +0000

Internet users have more than just a few options to download free music from the web. Common solutions include recording Internet radio, downloading music from portals like Jamendo and ripping music from Youtube videos. Pymaxe is a free open source software for Linux and Windows that can be used to download music from various Internet resources to the computer.

The program supports the four services Trilulilu, YouTube, KOHit and MusicDumper, with the option to add additional services with plugins. The plugin section lists two at the moment, including a MySpace music downloader plugin.

download free music

Some plugins need to be activated before they become active. This is done in the Preferences. Here it is also possible to select the download directory, player for playing media streams directly and the conversion options.

music download

The search form in the main interface supports individual song titles and direct urls that point to songs or videos of one of the supported services. A search leads to a listing of songs that match the search query. Pymaxe displays an icon of the service the song was found on, as well as the artist, song title and length.

A double-click on a result opens a new window with media clip details. This window displays the download options. Depending on the source, it is possible to download files directly as audio or video. For Youtube it is furthermore possible to select the quality level of the video, which can influence the quality of the audio.

download music

Users who only want to download music from specific resources can filter the results listing by that service. This makes it possible to search and download music only from Youtube for instance.

Only one song or video can be selected for download at once. This means that Pymaxe is best suitable for downloading individual songs from the Internet, and not full albums. It is still possible to do the latter, but it requires quite some time to do so.

Pymaxe is an Open Source program for Windows and Linux. It can be downloaded directly from the project website.

Free Mp3 Downloads with Bee Mp3

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:40:16 +0000

Specialized mp3 search engines that let users download the mp3 songs found for free seem to appear by the dozen every week. Bee Mp3 is another one of those that copy the usability and interface of a search engine like Google but only let the user search for mp3 songs that can be downloaded from the web.

I don’t want to discuss the legal questions that surely arise when downloading songs found using Bee Mp3. Depending on the country that you live in it could either be completely legal, semi-legal or illegal to use it to find and download mp3 songs.

Bee Mp3 lets you search by album, artist, song or everything. Depending on the search phrase you might very well end up with hundreds of search results. Below the search mask are listings of the World, US and Euro Top 10 and a cloud of the latest 200 searches.

A search or a click on a top 10 song or artist loads the search result page which displays file names, song names, the name of the album, artist and search tags. A click on the file or song name tries to load the mp3 song. The link is encrypted and becomes visible as soon as the new website loads.

I conducted some tests with the result that several results lead to websites that are not existent anymore, ran out of bandwidth or removed the song. Testing some results however always lead to one website that had the complete song which could be listened to and downloaded from that website.

Even not so well known artists like Bridge to Solace, Ignite and At The Gates are found by Bee Mp3. As you can see I love Hardcore and Metal but do listen to different genres as well.

Conclusion:

Bee Mp3 is an easy to use search engine that finds popular and not so popular songs, artists and albums. Most search results lead to the right result which can be listened to or downloaded. It can be seen as an advanced mp3 search similar to that of Google with the benefit of interlinking search results by using tags like album and artist names.

via Lifehacker

Download free music from Last.fm

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:44:48 +0000

Did you know that Last.fm has a free mp3 download section on their music portal ? The Weekly Free Downloads category of Last.fm lists currently 189 songs that can be downloaded to your computer without charge. All songs are available on one page sorted by popularity. You do find some popular artists among them including Snoop Dog, Sarah Connor as well as some classics from Beethoven and Bach.

A download starts when you click on the Free link next to the artists name and song title. It is possible to listen to the songs before you start the download by clicking on the mp3 link in that row. The songs can be downloaded by visitors and users alike, no registration is needed for this.

One thing that bothers me a little bit is that the songs cannot be sorted by genre. I did however find a link on Liquid Parallax that pointed to a website where Last.fm users where categorizing the free mp3 downloads. Just click on one of the genres in the tagcloud which will load a new site where all artists of that genre that offer free mp3 downloads are listed.

Free Music List July 2007

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:18:20 +0000

The article Free Music List December 2005 was a very successful article back in 2005 and I finally found the time to update the article with new sites and get rid of links to sites that do not exist anymore. Most of the sites listed below allow downloads even for non registered users, several ask you to register after downloading some albums and some require a registration before you can start to download or stream music.

I added genres to several sites if it was obvious and did not mention one if the site offered more than one genre. Downloads means that you can directly download music – normally mp3 files – from the site while streaming means that you can stream the music on the website.

Take a look at my article about Grab++ for a possible method to download music from sites that stream music. Feel free to add any music site that you know and is not in the list.

Major Sites:

Archive.org Netlabels

Audiostreet

CCMixter

Dance Industries

Digital Sounds Electronic Music

DMusic

Electrobel Electronic music

Epitonic

ETree.org [torrent downloads]
FOEM

Garageband

Gigatracks

Jamendo [torrent downloads, streaming]

Only Streaming:

Altsounds Alternative [streaming]
Artistopia [streaming]
Blogmusic [streaming]
Bluebeat [streaming]
CDBaby [streaming]
Download.com [streaming]
Fabchannel Concerts [streaming]
Imeem [streaming]
Intomusic [streaming]
Last.fm [streaming]
Magnatune [streaming]
Mp3.com.au [streaming]
Musicovery Find new music [streaming]
Musicmesh Find similar artists [streaming]
Musipedia Midi Files [streaming]
Seeqpod [streaming]
Soundpedia [streaming]
Stage.fm [streaming]
Stereokiller [streaming]

Blogs:

3Hive

Free Albums Galore

Gratisvibes [Download id not defined]
Large Hearted Boy

Other:

Cantaria Traditional Western European Folk

Classic Cat Classic Music

Feels Like Christmas Christmas Songs vocal and instrumental

Free Children’s Music Children’s Music [Download id not defined]
Freesound Sounds, not songs

Kahvi [streaming, download]
Karadar Classic Music, currently script problems

Lawrence

Legal Torrents [torrent downloads]
Mixposure Indie Music

MP3 Jackpot

Muzie Japanese site

New Trinity Baroque Classic Music [streaming, downloads]
Overclocked Remix remixed game music [torrent downloads]
Opsound

Piano Society Classical music

Public Domain 4U

Pure Volume

Unexotica Amiga music archive

Soundclick [streaming]
Soundlift [streaming]
South by Southwest 2007 [Download id not defined]
South by Southwest 2006 [Download id not defined]
South by Southwest 2005 [Download id not defined]
Superhits

Tonspion German site

Weed Files

Jamendo distributed one million albums

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:22:01 +0000

The free social music networking site Jamendo announced today that they have distributed more than one million downloads of albums that are freely available using bittorrent technology. Only albums that have been fully distributed have been counted or as they put it: “this figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far”. This is a huge success for sites that believe that drm free music sites can and will succeed in the long run. Jamendo has an incredible download rate of more than 200000 albums every month and the figure is increasing with each passing month.

The most successful album on Jamendo has been downloaded more than 11000 times which is a huge success for the artists that decided to upload their work to Jamendo. Users can listen to and download more than 2800 albums at Jamendo using streams and the bittorrent network. If you are looking for free music you should definetely visit Jamendo and start listening to some of the tracks suggested there. Below is a short sample of my favorite songs that can be listened to and downloaded at Jamendo. (I’m into Electronica at the moment)