How To Legally Boost Your Music Library Without Spending A Dime
The music industry has changed a lot since MP3 players came around. Now we have thousands of digital stores, streaming services, blogs, and artist curated websites dishing out free music all the time. It’s easier than ever to create a massive music library without spending a dime. Here’s how to do it.
Ever since Napster, the music industry has been a little strange. People have built music libraries for free from peer-to-peer sharing and Usenet that would put a library to shame. Nowadays, it’s not hard to do legally as long as you’re willing to spend a little time looking.
Search the Big Digital Stores for Free Tracks
At one point, it was only possible to track down free music from independent artists and labels. That’s still mostly the case, but that doesn’t mean you can’t build a big music library for free, and still include some big names.
Finding these tracks can sometimes be a mess though. One good place to start is Amazon’s free MP3 page. From there, it’s also worth checking out the Free on iTunes section in iTunes, and Google Play’s free section. Oftentimes these sites are just unloading odd music from artists you’ve never heard of, but sometimes you can catch a popular track or two.
Search Artist-Uploaded Websites for Free Singles and Alternate Tracks
One of the best ways to get free music is to hit up artist-run uploading spots and stores. Almost every song on SoundCloud is available as a free download. You can also check out the Free Music tag on Bandcamp for an abundance of free albums, but it’s worth noting that not all bands use that tag so your mileage may very.
Another site worth checking out is Jamendo, which offers royalty-free music for download. Better still is their recently relaunched Radio feature where you can listen to a curated playlist of a genre of music and download the albums you like directly from the player.
If you’re hunting for specific tracks it’s always worth hitting up an artist or label website as well. Oftentimes artists big and small will give out free copies of their new singles or EPs for the price of an email address. An easy way to track this is to set up Google Alerts for your favorite artist. For instance, to set up an alert for Prince, you would do “Prince free MP3” or “free download.” When a result comes up you get pinged at your email address. It also never hurts to follow your favorite musicians on your social network of choice for dibs on free tracks, alternate versions, and live songs.
Public Domain and the Free Music Archive
You might think that public domain music is kind of cheesy, but it has a lot of good stuff, especially if you’re a fan of classical, early folk, or early jazz. Since copyright law varies by country these are often hard to track down, but International Music Score Library Project is a good place to start your hunt. The Library of Congress National Jukebox is also full of classic songs, although you can’t download them all. For a huge collection of old recordings from all over the world, Archive.org has a collection of live music, old 78 RPM recordings, and a ton of music from old net labels.
For a far easier solution that includes a good search engine and curation, The Free Music Archive is your best bet. You can browse by artist, genre, and more. If the massive archive is overwhelming, you can start at the Curator page for samplers and commentary to help you along your way.
Hunt Through Legal MP3 Blogs for Advance Tracks and Singles
It was once the case that MP3 blogs were a haven for people to store pirated copies of albums, but since the shutdown of sites like Megaupload these blogs have slowly dissapeared. However, out of those origins were legitimate, artist supported MP3 downloads.
This includes sites like Spinner, Last.fm, and Stereogum (there’s too many to list all of them here) where its easy to track down singles from indie artists. You can also search a bunch of places at once with aggregators like Hype Machine and Ex.fm.
Chances are that whatever your genre preference in music is, you can can find a site that offers tons of free sample tracks.
Build (or Expand Upon) Your Library with Streaming Services
This might seem obvious to some people, but it’s still worth noting that most of the major streaming services off pretty simple streaming integration with your pre-existing library.
On Spotify, for instance, every song you star is automatically added to your library. With Rdio your Collection is essentially an extension of what you already own, and Mog uses the Favorites tag to integrate songs into your library. Streaming services are not exactly the same as having your own MP3s, but they’re another way to extend your current library.
It’s not hard to track down free and legal music these days. You might struggle to find something incredibly specific, but discovering new music is part of the fun.
Source: Lifehacker
