The reason for Google is that they are only number two in the search engine market in China. Baidu is first there and offering music downloads as well albeit without a similar deal. The reason why the Music Industry agreed to the deal is simple: Money. The majority of Chinese do not pay for music but download it from the Internet. And so it was decided that sharing some advertising revenue with Google is better than fighting illegal music downloads.

Google is restricting file downloads to Chinese users according to Mashable who were the first to publish the story. The search interface on the other hand is available for everyone.

Definitely an interesting progression especially for Chinese users who can now download music legally while everyone else in the world cannot.

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The internet has made it very easy to get access to music. You can stop by the innumerable music blogs, online radio stations, etc. for your daily fix. Plus, you can transfer music to your mp3 player or hard drive so that you can take your music with you.

The internet has also raised an ugly monster in the form of DRM or digital rights management. Users who want to support the record industry often find themselves having to fork out a hefty sum for songs that are crippled so that you cannot listen to them on more than one device.

That’s why sites like RCRDLBL are a breath of fresh air. The site, whose name is ‘Record Label’ without the vowels offers up a plethora of legal alternatives for music lovers. The best part? Their music is completely free.

RCRD LBL is actually a collection of music blogs and online record labels. It’s been formed to give artists a platform to display their music and allow listeners a money-free audio experience. RCRD LBL encourages people to download music from their site and share them with friends.

All the music on the site is DRM-free so you can transfer it to your iPod, CDs, cell phone etc. Artists are paid by the ad sponsorships on the site so you don’t have to pay anything for songs. While anyone can download songs off the site, only registered users can get music updates, post comments, etc.

RCRD LBL is extremely gracious about sharing music. They have widgets you can use to post tracks from the site onto your own blog or website. RCRD LBL is also available on Twitter and carry regular podcasts. In addition, every artist has their own RSS feed so you can keep track of your favorite artist’s goings on. You can also submit your own music directly to them if you’d like it to be included on the site.

Most of the artists here are emerging talents and those that are signed to small or independent labels. There are also some big names like Moby. I found a lot of artists I’d heard before as well as new ones. Overall, RCRD LBL is a great place to scout for upcoming musicians and basically discover music you might not have heard otherwise.

What do you think of RCRD LBL? Do you enjoy listening to music online? What other legal, DRM-free, music sites do you know of? Let me know in the comments.

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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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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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