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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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