Monday Feb 13 2006 - 3:05am
Free Music, No Really, Gobs of Free Music
by Grant
under No Tags
with 18 comments
A lot of people think that free music means stealing from a record label. Now I hate the stupid record labels and the Sony root-kits as much as the next guy, but if you really want to stick it to the man, why are you listening to their music anyway? Nowadays the cool kids listen to music released in the public domain or under a free license like Creative Commons.
8bitpeoples
8-bit music is the next big thing from yesteryear. For years, community sites such as micromusic.net have been collecting free songs from artists all over the world and giving it away for free. I signed up for their mailing list and found out about the Data Destruction Tour 2005, which came to The Enormous Room in Boston.
I caught the show and chatted with bitshifter, one of the leading artists in this genre. He suggested I check out 8bitpeoples, a collective of artists that give out loads of music for absolutely free.
I suggest starting with the torrent containing all of the 8bitpeoples releases through 8bp041 in tasty MP3 format. My favorites are by twilight electric.
Earplug
Earplug is a mailing list that comes out twice a month and offers reviews of good music, most if not all of which comes out on independent labels. All styles are represented, from classic reggae to progressive rock to mash up. Each issue reviews about five new albums.
The best part about Earplug, however, is its links to freely available DJ sets. I was disappointed when a lot of the links were RealAudio files. I refuse to run RealAudio ever since it kept installing obnoxious news popups and updaters. The latest issue is chock-full-o’-MP3s, however.
My favorite is Nick Catchdubs’s Masala mix from the Bounce le Gros nights in Montreal. I’d never heard of the DJ or the club or anything, and my high school French isn’t good enough to understand the franglish in this blog post, but the MP3 rocks my proverbial Cagleian socks off. About 20 minutes in he’s blasting pieces of trite rap songs and re-contextualizing them into quality music.
Free concerts from NPR
Drew just told me that National Public Radio (from the United States, to all our international readers such as the one from Slovenia I saw in the logs) has recently started offering full concerts from quality bands on their website. Worth a look for sure. I can’t claim to be much of a fan of the groups they’ve had so far, although I’ve been meaning to give most of these groups a listen for some time. I’ve got some downloading to do!
Oddio
Oddio is a loosely-defined genre of music that has been forgotten, but not lost. For example, there are the one-shot vanity song poems recorded when some poor schmuck sent lyrics into an address in the back of his comic book and thought he would become a famous song writer. Other oddio includes records of old high school bands, test records to make sure your speakers are set up right, and jingles from 1960s radio.
The Internet Archive has a nice big source of oddio and other old public domain music and audio. Since this music is in the public domain, have at it! Remix, chop, even resell it to your friends!
Other major oddio sites include Oddio Overplay and Basic Hip Digital Oddio.
Indy
Indy is a free application for most major platforms that downloads Creative Commons-licensed music for you and lets you rate it from 1 to 5. Based on your ratings and how they compare to those from other users, Indy pulls down more music and plays it for you. Unlike some of the other free music sites like Pandora, Indy lets you keep the music that you like. It even deletes the music that you give the lowest ratings to. Thanks to Matt Colyer of Flagr for originally introducing me to Indy.
Keep looking
There’s plenty more where that came from. Some good leads can be found on the list of all mp3s posted to del.icio.us, which coincidentally doubles as a podcast.
If you know of any other good sources of free music, please post them in the comments. My only request is that the music be fully downloadable to an mp3 or similar quality file at no charge with no DRM restrictions.
So load up days and days of music onto your iPod or other digital media device, hit shuffle, and send me a message when you find something you like!
1
Check http://www.jamendo.com
It has a variety of music styles and most are available in high quality MP3 or Ogg.
I found a lot of great artists on this website.
2
Live Music Archive here: http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php
3
Check out http://www.irateradio.com/
4
thanks alot, Grant! what a great blog. i look forward to reading more of your awesome thoughts.
patrick
5
What about http://www.pandora.com
6
OK, well, ignore my last comment. Skimmed through the article too quickly
7
A great source for live shows is the Furthur Network, “the first and only 100% non-commercial, open-source, peer-to-peer network of legal live music created by fans for fans.” — http://www.furthurnet.org
8
(Trackback)
alwaysBETA » Fighting for the Future
[…] As Doctorow pointed out, the mantra that “content is king” is quickly being taken over by the idea that “conversation is king“. Sites like The Facebook and MySpace prove that a lot of money can be made just by facilitating open communication and getting out of the way. That’s true for notes to your friends as much as it with clips of free music as I mention in my previous blog post, video on YouTube, and photos on Flickr. […]
9
Make sure and check out http://www.ocremix.org/ for awesome free Video Game Remixes as well. Some are incredibly well done.
10
(Post Author)
I have tried to submit a couple of my own songs to OCRemix but they weren’t accepted. Although I never got an official rejection so I’m not sure if it didn’t get through.
11
www.dmusic.com
12
have u heard about www.rockinducedlabor.com?
13
A new site to keep a close eye on is my site blocsonic.com. Every month we release a compilation featuring 10 tasty tracks from the wide world of netlabels. We choose to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. You’ll only get 10 of the absolute best tracks that we’ve so far come across. Each compilation comes with original artwork and a 30+ page PDF booklet.
14
Hi! Nice site!
15
There are a number of good music community sites out there that have songs from musicians who record their own stuff. Our site, MacJams.com, is one of them. We have tens of thousands of songs available for free listening and download, all home made with love.
http://www.macjams.com
16
Thanks for the tips in listening to music. Everyone always thinks there’s a catch to free music. Guess this put’s everything to rest.
Cheers,
Joe The PSP Music Lover
17
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Free Music Nextel Real Ringtone by Ringtones
[…] alwaysBETA » Free Music, No Really, Gobs of Free Music Tell me I’m pretty. Main Menu Home Blog About Us Blog Post Moo.FX: Hot Effects on a Diet » « How many “R”s was that? Free Music, No Really, Gobs of Free Music Mon 13 Feb 2006 - 3:05am by Grant Tags: free, music Comments: 15 A lot o […]
18
(Trackback)
Free Music Nextel Ring Tone by Ringtones
[…] alwaysBETA » Free Music, No Really, Gobs of Free Music Tell me I’m pretty. Main Menu Home Blog About Us Blog Post Moo.FX: Hot Effects on a Diet » « How many “R”s was that? Free Music, No Really, Gobs of Free Music Mon 13 Feb 2006 - 3:05am by Grant Tags: free, music Comments: 15 A lot o […]