In today’s world, music is omnipresent. It has swept into all aspects of our lives, be it TV, movies, shopping malls, public toilets, ringtones or waiting loops. Yet we still crave more.
Music stimulates the brain. It’s this deep rooted cultural pleasure that drives us to consume more and more of it.
If you’re sick of the commercial pabulum and ready to discover new and fresh artists, dive into this list to explore ten of the best sites for legal and free mp3 downloads. Get your mp3 player connected, here comes cargo!
10. Free Kids Music
As the name reveals, this page hosts free music for children.
Artists can be listed alphabetically. A separate category is traditional music, which contains songs such as My Bonnie, Amazing Grace, Kumbaya, Frère Jacques, or The Alphabet Song.
9. Dramacore
Dramacore is a netlabel that publishes music under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Dramacore netlabel was made for people looking to download free music. And to support a diverse array of artists wanting to avoid the stupidity of corporations, mainstream propaganda, and trendy sellout dating websites. Long live the do it yourself spirit.
The people behind Dramacore furthermore emphasize that their netlabel is a serious project. The website is hosted professionally and funded until 2012.
8. MP3.com
The idea of MP3.com is to provide artists with the opportunity to promote their work, and music fans the chance to discover new talents.
MP3.com has been around for quite some time and is the most comprehensive archive for free music downloads. Being so popular, it also attracts some of the bigger performers.
You will find streaming music from the Pet Shop Boys, Eminem, 50 Cent, Linkin Park, and The Beatles. Free MP3 downloads are available from thousands of artists. Unfortunately, the free music tracks are very hard to browse or find, unless you know what you’re looking for.
7. Last.fm
Last.fm not only provides free music streams and recommendations, but also features some great tracks for free download.
Currently, there are over 200 free mp3 downloads, including songs from Jaydiohead, Peter Björn and John, The Thermals, White Lies, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Guns N’ Roses, Moby, and Nine Inch Nails. You can sort the free downloads by genre.
Check out my previous review on TheLastRipper if you want to record Last.FM tracks to your computer.
6. Amazon
A little known fact is that even Amazon offers tons of free mp3s.
You can choose from over 1,000 tracks, which can be sorted by several criteria. The top five genres are Rock (338 songs), Alternative Rock (275 songs), Classical (195 songs), International (158 songs), and Pop (134 songs). Artists include Calexico, Ingrid Michaelson, The Lemonheads, Alice Cooper, and Paul McCartney.
But you need to be a US resident and have a US Amazon account to be able to download the tracks. So this one is only suitable for our American readers.
5. 7digital
7digital is a global digital media platform.
It’s their business to sell mp3s, but they also provide a great collection of free downloads, which are updated weekly. The sample tracks are categorized into rock, hip-hop, reggae / roots, various, and audiobooks.
4. Spinner Mp3 of the Day
Spinner is an AOL project, which runs an MP3 of the day section.
Some better known artists featured recently were of Montreal, The Swell Season, The Futureheads, Simian Mobile Disco, and The XX.
Clicking on MP3 OF THE DAY under EXCLUSIVES on the left-hand side opens Spinner’s web-based radio station.
3. NME The Daily Download
The UK’s New Music Express (NME) supplies music addicts with their Daily Download fix.
Generally, songs can be downloaded days, weeks and even months after they were published on The Daily Download. Recent artists include Paper Route (recently saw them supporting Paramore), Yeasayer, The Antlers, Exlovers covering Chris Isaak, Joensuu 1685 covering Bruce Springsteen, Röyksopp, Maximo Park, The Prodigy, and Metallica.
2. Free Music Archive
The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads.
The music on this page was picked by established audio curators and pre-cleared for online use. It’s suitable for podcasts, videos or any other format of digital use and publishing.
You can browse the material by curator, genre, recently added highlights, and most interesting highlights.
1. Epitonic
Epitonic is a curated site, which offers free mp3 downloads along with a web-based audio stream, artist profiles, and reviews.
The site can help you explore new genres with short audio guided tours. Go to genres/radio to have a look at the walk-throughs.
Epitonic’s releases include artists like Grand National, Groove Armada, Zero 7, Mogwai, Belle and Sebastian, and Peaches.
When logged in you can create an individual playlist of songs hosted on the site.
Where do you explore and discover music, and how do you retrieve your music fix?
Image credits: uqaldew
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Hide 21 Comments
i’m shocked you missed Jamendo , a great site with 28K Creative Commons’ licensed albums. Fully 1/4 of the music on my iPod comes from Jamendo.
Wait until my next post. :)
Thats a good list for mp3s. I thought that you had to pay for mp3s at mp3.com. Also songs can be download from purevolume.com.
Thanks for the list, and the mention of FreeKidsMusic.com.
A couple other good sites:
http://GreatSongsFree.com (focuses on really good songs, rather than artists)
http://FreeMusicGroup.com (a blog which keeps over 3000 subscribers up to date on great new free/legal downloads from a number of sites)
Another good resource:
http://thefreemusicdirectory.com
Links to hundreds of artist sites, where at least a single free MP3 download is offered.
nice work including netlabel music :]
amiestreet.com offer MPs for free if you get there early. Some are fairly well-known some not
Nice post! I Love New Music.
Uh…epitonic is no longer active.
Yes, it is.
http://delicious.com/butterknife/epitonic
epitonic was one the first music sites I ever went to. I heard about it in pcmag
mp3.com goes way back. I really miss music.download.com though. listen.com use to be so awesome.
I forgot about the now defunt webjay.com where you could create playlist. good quality music.
http://www.jamendo.com
jamglue (dot) com is also another good website, not only does it have music, but you can also make an account and remix you favorite tunes. oh and you need an account to download music.
Nice article! Another suggestion is http://www.4shared.com
I think it also offers downloads for games too.
Nice listing Tina-I am bummed that you have to be located in the US in order to take the Amazon downloads tho. I am more into classic rock and am looking for a good free source.
Apparently, someone added that bit of text, it was not me.
In fact, I’m not in the US, I don’t have US Amazon account, I’m in Germany, and could download the files just fine. It also doesn’t say anywhere that you have to be in the US.
ou do have to log in. However, my German login details were accepted.
how missing..songs.pk??????
for listening on the fly, i use
http://www.grooveshark.com
http://www.songza.com
and for finding that elusive song i want to keep..
http://beemp3.com
Theres other music with free mp3′s:
http://dubcnn.com/
http://www.unsignedbandweb.com/