Top Indie Music Websites (100% Legal, DRM-free Downloads)

What is indie music? Basically, indie music (from independent) refers to the music that is independent from the commercial music industry and usually associated with autonomous, label-free artists/bands. Below you’ll find some of coolest indie music repositories on the web.

(1) iJigg

iJigg is a community where independent artists post their tracks for iJigg users to rate them. Top rated tracks appear on the front page. Users can easily play tracks, share them with friends, embed tracks elsewhere (i.e. Myspace), create playlists and in many cases download them.

(2) Jamendo

Slightly different in nature but no less of a cool community for indie fans. Hosts over 2500 free to download music albums and provides a bunch of handy additional features, i.e.

• comprehensive Tag cloud, where each tag functions like dynamic playlist
• targeted RSS feeds (albums of the months, latest releases, genre specific…)

(3) Stage.fm

Based on the Alexa website popularity stats, Stage.fm seem to fall behind when compared to iJigg and Jamendo. Nonetheless, it’s the only listed service that provides its users with an option to search for free indie tracks that are similar to popular big-name tunes. For instance, searching for ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’ brings up all indie tracks that are similar to RHCP tracks.

(4) AmieStreet

‘…independent music (DRM-free) download website. All songs on AmieStreet start FREE and can rise upto 98 cents depending on how much the community likes it.’

To quickly navigate to those community-admired 98 cents tracks, just jump to the category of your choice and switch to “Buzzing-All Time” view. On the other hand, switching to the ‘latest’ view will bring all those yet to-be-rated tracks which for the time being can be downloaded for free.