Users with a Google Music account find at least one free song per day over at the Magnifier website. Each new song is introduced with a short review on the site and a “add free music” link to add the song free of charge to the user’s Google Music collection.

The songs are added online on the Google Music Beta website where they can be listened to. Google Music offers no options to download songs to a computer. The program Google Music Downloader adds that functionality so that it is possible to download the free songs to the PC.

The Magnifier website has a free song archive where all past songs of the day are grouped into genres. One nice feature here is the ability to add all songs of a selected genre at once to Google Music.

One song per day may not seem much but it is a free service nevertheless. You find songs from various music genres, e.g. Metal, Alternative and Hip-Hop or Rap there.

Another interesting thing on the Magnifier website is the artist of the week feature which offers a short biography of the selected artist or band plus links to free songs.

The last option is located under the Scanner link on the Magnifier website. Here you find multiple themed tracks, from classic over hip-hop to electronic and jazz.

I have to admit that I’m personally not using any online music storage services which can be attributed to the fact that I have no requirements to access my music collection on other devices. What about you? Are you using music services like Google Music or Amazon Music?

The site clearly has been created by people who love video games. The organization goes so far as to claim that they are “dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form.” Up in the right hand corner you will notice a mascot. That mascot will change with every page reload and you can click on them for more information. They come from a myriad of games and are undiscriminating of systems, as does the music within the site.

There are several ways to reach the music within the site. The latest songs are listed on the right. Random songs are listed towards the bottom of the page. You can search for games that may have remixes by name. Typically, games for the NES, SNES, and Sega will a few good songs to choose from, but new games have a growing number of remixes as well. You can list songs by game alphabetically or by number of remixes from the Music menu at the top of the page. You can also go to the torrent page.

Torrents are often associated with illegal downloading, but this is an example of legal file sharing. In fact, using the torrents will help the site. How can it do that? Simple: torrents save the site bandwidth costs. The files in the torrents are the same ones that you can download from the site. By using the torrents, the bandwidth comes from fellow users rather than traditional web servers. The torrents have a lot of content. At the time of writing, you can download the first thousand songs, the next nine hundred songs, and twenty nine albums. The albums often come in both MP3 and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) formats, so the quality of the tracks is high.

Here are some recommendations. I tried to represent a variety of tastes and systems. The one thing these songs have in common, besides being based on video games, is good sound quality. Keep in mind that any assertions made are my opinion and subjective. (I make no claims to be a music expert.)

• Chrono Trigger – The Frog Dance : A fast paced, chipper tune (probably house or club genre). It is suitable for a workout playlist.
• Final Fantasy 11 Online – A Cinematic Heaven : An example of an orchestral song. The sampling may be noticeable to experienced ears, but it still pleasant.
• Final Fantasy 13 – Blue Skies : An example of a song with vocals, but distinctly techno. Trance influences soften its edges.
• Super Metroid – In Your Prime : This composition starts off very dark but steadily increases the tempo to a climax. An interesting work.
• Sonic the Hedgehog – April Rain : A whimsical tune that will evoke nostalgic memories within seconds. The style is a blend of orchestral and techno music.

The web site and community there encourage others to try their hand at creating new remixes. They have a variety of tutorials and avenues for feedback. There is a list of software on the Links page (see “Music-Making Software”), but the tutorials are general enough to accommodate various types software and tools. If you wanted to learn how to make music on a computer, this is not a bad community to learn from.

If you are interested in contributing and not just consuming, I would encourage you to read the Content Policy. While it does not claim ownership to the uploaded music or anything alarming, they outright specify that they typically do not take down content. Once you post something on the site, it is expected to stay there. While this makes sense for fans, it may not for composers. In general, it is good to be aware of rules like this.

With thousands of songs, and several sources to download from, most people should be able to find something to add to their MP3 collection. Enjoy the music. Let us know in the comments if you find a song worth downloading.

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.

Set Up the Double Download

By default, it is an extra step to download files from your Cloud Drive. The settings are easy to find. Naturally, you have to be signed in to get to these settings. You will also need the Amazon MP3 Downloader. This is free software that you can configure to sync with iTunes, Windows Media Player, or to not sync at all.

Step 1: Click on “Your Digital Items” on the top right of Amazon’s home page above the cart and wish list buttons (it may appear on other pages too).

Step 2: Under “Amazon MP3 Store” click on “You Amazon MP3 Settings,” found towards the middle of the page.

Step 3: Finally, you will see two settings, each with two options. Feel free to read through it, but you just have to make sure the first option in each of the two settings is selected. See the screenshot for all the detail.

Now when you aquire a song it will be loaded to your Cloud Drive and the MP3 Downloader will put the files on your computer. A small file that ends in .amz may download to your computer at first. Open it to launch the MP3 Downloader. Please note there is no “Apply Settings” or “Save Settings” to click on the website. You just click the circles next to the options you want and you are done.

Mooch Off Amazon a Full Album at a Time

Grabbing a heap of music from Amazon for free is easy. Oddly enough, I do not know anyone who takes advantage of it (locally at least).

You do not have to follow the steps above to download free music, but I would advise it. It gives you a backup, and free songs are perfect to try-out “double downloading” with. Why backup free music in the first place? Because it will not always be free; these are often limited time offers. You may have to pay to download something again if you lose a song. In case of accidental deletion or a hard drive crash, everything would be saved in a completely separate location, in this case Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon lets you to download songs from there, for free, as many times as you like.

That said, let’s get to the free music!

Step 1: To get the the general MP3 section start from the main page, hover your mouse over “MP3s & Cloud Player” and then click on “MP3 Music Store” to the right. (Note: “Hover” means to move your mouse to something, but do not click the mouse button yet.)

Step 2: Scroll way down to about halfway down the page. You will see a lot of stuff: albums, information, icons, etc. You are looking for the image below. Click on “Free MP3 Albums” when you find it. You can alternatively use this link to go directly to that page: Free Music

Step 3: While you land at a page with the most popular music, you should consider narrowing it down to a genre you prefer. I recommend the Classical section. I found a number of full albums I liked there.

Wrapping Things Up

Note that you will need the Amazon MP3 Downloader to download full albums. This is regardless of your settings. The downloader has the benefit of enabling you to download multiple songs from the Cloud Player too (but not the Cloud Drive, which can only download files one at a time). That means you can restore all your Amazon music fairly easily, provided a backup was in the Cloud Drive, in the event of a computer problem. That is a nice free feature.

You also need to know that you can only download music from an Amazon store if the shipping address of your account is in the same country as the store.

The Amazon US store is currently offering 197 mp3 albums for free download. The German Amazon store only six albums.

I hope these little tips will save you some time and expose you to some new music. Enjoy!

Usually the most popular downloads are shown on the home page of the iTunes store. As you can see from this image the film ‘The Tourist’ with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp is on display, as well as some of the top singles this week. However, these are not cheap. Obviously, one or two downloads a week isn’t going to break the bank, but for those who like to discover new music, this isn’t really an option. This is why free downloads on iTunes are great.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that come with downloading free music from iTunes. Firstly, there is the ability to discover new music that you probably would not have been able to find otherwise. There are several artists available on iTunes with free tracks. The good thing about this is that you can continuously add new music to your iTunes library and possibly discover an artist that you love and would like to hear more of. When you are buying music from iTunes you are only going to be buying songs by artists that you have actually heard of whereas free music offers a much wider range of different styles of music that you would not otherwise listen to.

Of course, there are downsides to downloading free music on iTunes, but these negatives are far outweighed by the positives. The only real negative is that you are not going to be able to get well known songs by really popular artists for free. Occasionally, there will be popular songs available for free download such as live versions, but this is not a regular occurrence. So, you may be wondering how you can download free music from iTunes. The good news is that this really couldn’t be simpler. First, you are going to want to scroll down to the bottom of the home page, as shown below.

Here you will see a section labelled as ‘Free On iTunes’. Please note that this section may not be available in all localized iTunes stores.Once you see this section you should click on the ‘See All’ tab, and you will be presented with the page shown below.

The great thing about this section is that not only can you download free music, but you can also download TV episodes, movies, music videos, and apps all for free. As you can see from the image shown above, this is a really easy page to navigate. All you have to do is click on the song that you want to download and then it will start downloading automatically. Once the download is complete you will find it in your library on iTunes. It really is as simple as that. So, there you go, a quick guide on getting free stuff from iTunes!

The iTunes store is regularly replacing the free music, tv shows and other media with new free media. It pays to check the section regularly.

You do need an Apple iTunes account that is associated with a real person in the iTunes store’s country to download free music, tv shows and other media.

It is theoretically possible to create a fake account to download the free music and stuff from iTunes. It is not that complicated to setup but legally questionable.

You find a good mixture of established artists in the list including songs by Bif Naked, Underoath or Warren G but the majority of songs comes from artists that most visitors probably never heard of. This does not necessarily mean that this is bad music. It is actually a good way of discovering new artists that are not that in the focus of mass media.

The downloaded songs have been encoded with 192 Kbit and it is likely that all songs are encoded in this bitrate. Music can be sorted by letter or genre which helps to find the right music genre or artist.

There is no word yet on the duration of this promotion. Thanks goes to jagslive for sending us the tip.

Apple’s 12 Days of Christmas’ Giveaway provides one free download every day between 26 Dec and 6 Jan. Yesterday, Apple were offering a music video of ‘That’s Not My Name’ by ‘The Tings Tings’ (number 1 back in May) and today, a free episode of ‘Derren Brown’s Mind Control’.

iTunes users in the UK need only click this link to access the giveaway!

Rumours exist that Apple are planning this giveaway in France, but I am unable to confirm whether it is there. Unfortunately for Americans, Apple has confirmed it won’t be happening outside of Europe!

Another unfortunate thing about this giveaway is that iTunes is needed to download them; making it impossible for Linux users to access.

The giveaway is worth checking out as you may find a TV show, movie or song you like for free!

Before you go ahead and make use of the methods described in this article I would like to remind you that those methods are legal in some countries but not all. You still have to check if it’s ok in your country before you download 1000+ songs a day using the methods listed below.

The chance that you get caught ranges from slim (Music Search Engines) to virtually impossible (Internet Radio) though and is way below the chance of getting caught trading music in P2P networks.

The methods are listed alphabetically and I only described a few services and programs to download music. If you do some research you will find many more applications and services.

Free Music:

Free music has a bad reputation on the Internet. That is undeserved and can be mostly attributed to spam and malicious software. If you look around a bit you find massive amounts of free music that can be downloaded to the local hard drive.

Jamendo is surely one of the top locations for free music on the Internet. Jamendo is currently offering more than 11000 albums on their website. Direct download and Bittorrent downloads are available and the whole site concept deserves a larger userbase than they currently have. It pretty much works after an “if you like the artist visit his website and buy some merch or CDs” system.

Jamendo is not the only way to get your free share of music. I have collected a large list of possibilities called the music list some time ago. Most if the websites and services are still in existence these days.

Internet Radio:

That’s probably one of the easiest ways to download music from the Internet. Thousands of Internet Radio stations cater to the music listening taste of almost everyone. From metal over gospel to christian, there is a good chance that you find a station that is playing exactly the music that you like.

One of the best tools for recording Internet Radio is Streamripper in combination with its frontend Stripper in my opinion.

That’s a combo for super-easy recordings of multiple Internet Radio streams at once. The advantage of this method is that it runs automatic after pressing the start recording button. Just sit down and relax while the software programs download song after song to your hard drive.

Another advantage is that you pick the stations which means that you can include factors like bitrate in the selection process. Each station plays usually between 15-20 songs per hours. That’s between 360 to 480 per Internet Radio station and day. Imagine recording multiple stations simultaneously. The only real limit is your Internet connection.

Streamripper tries to save songs correctly if the Internet Radio Station sends those information. You end up with music that uses the song and artist as the name and some proper tags.

A great directory to start looking for interesting Internet Radio Stations is the Shoutcast directory.

Music Communities:

Music communities, like Last.fm and partially also MySpace, offer a vast amount of music that can be listened to online. They also lack direct download features but the usual tools work pretty well to download music from those websites.

The Last Ripper is for example an excellent tool to Save Last.fm music. Grab++ and Download Helper should also work wonders on most sites.

It is usually not a problem to download the songs. If nothing helps a direct audio recording tool like Audacity does the trick. That tool can record all sounds that the user can hear, a last resort so to speak.

Music Search Engines:

Music Search Engines like SeeqPod or MP3zy crawl the Internet for audio related content which gets added to their vast database. The results are presented like any other search on regular search engines like Google with the difference that they can be played directly in the browser window.

They usually do not offer ways to download the music that can be played directly. It is however usually not a problem to download the streams that are offered directly to the computer. A good combination is using the software Grab++ which is part of Orbit Downloader, a free download manager that supports downloading from many media sites directly.

Youtube:

If you search on Youtube for artists, albums or songs you will most likely find a video with music that you are looking for. After that it is only a matter of downloading the Youtube video and ripping the audio from it.

The combination of Download Helper, a Firefox extension that can download videos from Youtube and many other video websites, and Audio Extractor does the trick.

Just load the downloaded Youtube videos into Audio Extractor, select an output format and wait until the audio has been extracted. The only problem of that method is the audio quality which differs tremendously.

Once you got that install the software. You might notice the Winamp Plugin which is probably the better way of saving Internet Radio tracks because you can use it from within Winamp that way. Since I’m not using Winamp I favor the command line option. Another option would be to install Winamp and use it just for the purpose of downloading Internet Radio tracks.

Streamripper can save track information, like artist and album, if the Radio Station is sending those information. This is great because you will end up with correctly named and tagged tracks. If no information are send you will end up with one huge mp3 file in the end.

I assume you have installed Streamripper and are ready to go. The first thing that we need to do is locate a Internet Radio stream. You can use shoutcast for this for instance which is a directory that contains hundreds, if not thousands, of Internet Radio stations that can be listened to directly with the click of the mouse.

What you need to do to find out the stream url is the following. Right-click the tune in button on the Shoutcast website and select Save Link As from the menu. This will download a .pls file that contains the information that we need. Open the Playlist file in a text editor and locate the line beginning with File1=. The stream url is located in that line.

Now open the Windows command line (Windows R, cmd, enter) and navigate to the directory where Streamripper was installed to. It is located by default in the streamripper folder in program files.

cd c:\program files\streamripper

The command to start saving songs from Internet Radio stations is a basic one, it is.

streamripper url

Enter the stream url that you found earlier and Streamripper will automatically begin to download songs to your hard drive. One useful parameter is the -d parameter which defines the directory where the music is saved into.

streamripper url -d e:\music\new\

This would save all songs in e:\music\new\. The major benefit of running Streamripper in command line mode is that you do not need to listen to the music while ripping. It’s a bit more complicated than using Winamp or XMPlay but it’s probably worth a shot if you have none of these players installed.

If you want to save two streams at the same time you simply open another command line window and use the command with the second url again.

I’m not saying that the Music Industry will become obsolete, songs still have to be produced somehow but for this concept to work they are not necessary at all. You probably were thinking that this would surely mean an ad-driven service if users were able to download songs for free. This is apparently not the case and leads to a social experiment. Users pay a monthly subscription which is not a fixed price but a sum that the users can select themselves.

You pay the artists as much as you want. It remains to be seen if this idealistic system will be able to compete with the established music portals. It will be rather difficulty to find enough established musicians and bands who will support this project. I’m not an expert when it comes to contracts between artists and the Music Industry but I suppose the Music Industry will not allow their artists to upload songs to Playble.

So, it will have the usual selection of unknown and independent bands instead of major artists such as Madonna, Take That and Robby Williams. It would still be great to see some of the more influential artists support the new model.

What I really like about Playble ? They believe in their users and the artists, that everyone will get a fair share. The Music Industry does not trust their customers at all..

found: zeropaid

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)

I think that this is a good way to listen to great music for free, support the artists that contribute their music and show the music industry that there are other methods to distribute than forcing the customer to buy copy protected, rootkit infested overpriced music cds.

Update: I published a new updated list that can is named Free Music List July 2007.

Today I decided to compile a big list of free music sites on the internet, I hope you enjoy this selection.

I encourage everyone to add his site to the list and give a rough intro to it. The list does not contain internet radio stations or streaming services, only sites that allow downloads in mp3 format (its fine if they offer additional streaming services) . I made an exception to sites that offer a huge list of streaming titles, those have been added as well.

All suggestions contain examples to make it easier for the reader. The comments also include some great suggestions as well. Its always a good thing to receive more tips on this subject. I did not know the webjay service for example, a nice playlist community site.

Update: The article is no longer available on the Lifehacker website, probably due to some site redesign that has taken place. I suggest you check out or free music list that points you to dozen of services that offer free music to visitors and registered users.

You can also check our living without the music industry for a general look at the possibilities that you have. Suggestions include Internet radio, downloading free music or audio blogs that post free music. Make sure you check out or downlading free music guide as well which offers an updated view and links to popular sites where you can get your music fix for free.

The guide suggests four different ways. First free music repositories like Jamendo which is one of the largest repositories offering nearly 50,000 music albums for free or the free music archive.

Music blogs have grown in popularity in recent times. Music gets posted regularly on blogs and aggregators with options to play it directly on the blog or to download it to the PC.

Internet radio is still popular and tools like Streamwriter make it easier than ever to record music from one or multiple stations at the same time. You can increase your music collection significantly with the program.

List but not least there is the option to convert YouTube music videos to mp3.