However, I would much prefer to be ahead of things and already know all the latest music, news and new bands. So I went out to find the best sources for alternative music novelty. Are you craving to hear what I found?

Here are five different websites that will still your hunger for fresh music, video clips, tour dates, news, gossip, and new artists.

Yahoo! Adult Alternative & Alternative Rock Stations

Before we dive into the muddy reality of the music world, let’s stick around at the surface for a bit and enjoy the result of all the hard work and advertising: the music.

I value Yahoo! music because they provide high quality video clips. The Adult Alternative Station provides "a mix of pop, rock, and alternative videos without the rep, bubble gum or hard stuff" and at Alternative Rock you’ll find "all your faves, plus new bands just hitting the scene." Just what I want. The best: you can create your own playlists from this and dozens of other video stations. The only drawback: one commercial before each clip.

NME

In the music news world, NME is an authority. But the online magazine has a lot more to offer than mere news. They feature album reviews, latest video releases, behind the scenes coverage from festivals and other events, and a special section for new music.

You can browse for a particular alternative music band or musician in the Artist section and find anything that was ever published about that person on NME. The coverage also includes a Biography, Discography, Videography and Books, if available.

Free daily MP3 downloads reside on the New Music page. The Radar recommends 10 new bands you need to hear each week. If you can’t get enough or want to share your own discoveries, sign up for MyNME and post your thoughts on the message boards, while receiving access to exclusive material. The membership is of course free.

PureVolume

This site focuses on new artists and their music, with little of the other dirt. Hence it’s less cluttered than NME, but also more useful and much more novel than Yahoo! Music. This is the perfect site to listen to new tracks and discover new alternative music because the tracks are uploaded by the artists themselves!

As you see in the screenshot above, there are four main sections: Music, Videos, Events, and People. The positive surprise was finding events, i.e. shows listed for places other than North America or the UK. Dozens of shows are listed for all over Germany on each single day. Even Egypt, Bulgaria, Jamaica, and Malaysia have solid listings, including preview audio files.

The site appears to have a very big community, which actively participates in keeping it fresh and up to date. The People section confirms this assumption. The only downside is the audio playback. It’s very basic and leaving a site means closing the track that’s playing.

The video playback is much more advanced, providing social media integration, and the quality is very good, allowing full screen view. Unfortunately, videos can’t be exported to an external window either.

There is a lot more to discover on PureMusic, so dive in!

Of course these are not the only sites for awesome alternative music. An honorable mention goes out to Alternative Addiction, which probably is the US version of NME, and Bowling Stone, a Canadian Indie / Alternative music blog where Chris, Julie and Paolo recommend "new music for your iPod."

If you care for live music, also check out Will’s recent post about 3 Ways To Track Tour Dates Of Your Favorite Rock Bands.

At what places do you stop to recharge your mp3 player or discover new music, videos, news, and background information? Pandora, Last.fm, Napster or anything we don’t know, yet? Surprise us in the comments!

Image credits: greekgod

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Just look at MakeUseOf, the site you’re hopefully browsing at the moment. Where in the world can you buy a magazine with (currently) 1,754 articles for free? (more if you include the Directory and Geeky Fun).

‘Free’ does exist, and it’s brought to us through the internet.

Last week we saw industry quality open-source games with Yo Frankie. This week, we’ll take a look at the audio visual side. Free industry quality movies are pretty scarce but free music can be found in many places. So, enter what in my opinion are the best sites to download free music.

Not the torrent or limewire kind; the I-take-it-without-paying-so-it’s free, but music released under creative licenses, by people who don’t think music should be a business. People who sing for emotions, not money.

Jamendo

All the music available on Jamendo is released under the Creative Commons license. This means that it can be freely listened to and used and redistributed under the same license.

The artists then get rewarded via user donations and revenues from the Jamendo’s commercial programs and partnerships.

You can browse through over 150,000 tracks by artist, album and genre, or you can use the tags for quick navigation.

All of the tracks and albums are available for download without any needed registration and can be shared over the internet using widgets.

CCHits

CCHits is a great website to find and share music under the Creative Commons license.

All the songs can be played on the spot and downloaded in MP3 format. You can browse through the different songs by date, the number of hits, or by using tags. Alternatively, you can also search through the database.

The site uses a digg-like system, in which you can ‘like’ a song. This will increase both the song’s rating and also allow you to find it easily again at a later moment.

To give songs your ‘liking’, see your listening history and your liked songs, you’ll need a Ning account. Signing up is a very quick and easy process.

The song database is somewhat limited at the moment, but this website is destined for growth. You can always help by uploading your own songs to the website.

Amie Street

Amie Street is an online marketplace for music by independent artists.

As you may have deducted from the word ‘marketplace’, not all music on this site is free, only the yet-undiscovered ones.

This is how it works: Initially, about all of the music that appears on Amie Street gets released without a price – you can then download it without paying a dime. However, as the popularity of the piece increases, the price goes up.

The trick is to browse the new releases, and find the musical pearls between them. Note that signing up is required to download an album.

Another great feature is that you can earn credits by recommending songs to friends – up to 98 cents per song – which you can use to buy some of the premium songs. The retail price of these premium songs never goes over 98 cents apiece either.

Check out our earlier story on Amie Street.

ccMixter

ccMixter hosts many a capellas and samples which can be freely downloaded and resampled by remixers. The samples can be ordered based on various categories, popularity, beats per minute, or can be looked through using search queries and tags. In short, a great place for DJs and alike to find free samples.

A lot of these remixes have also been reposted on the website, for video-makers to use or music lovers to enjoy. Among these remixes are some really high-quality works, that even most people with less interest in the genre (like me) will enjoy.

Newgrounds

Just like flash games and movies, lots of royalty-free songs are released daily on Newgrounds by aspiring musicians.

The author must be credited upon redistribution, and the music can only be used for non-commercial purposes. If you just want to play it on your computer though, there’s even less you need to worry about.

The major part of the songs consist of house and trance music, but pop, rock and even classical music is represented. Though a lot of the songs are only good to use in flash games and movies, there are also a ton of songs that wouldn’t look out of place on the average radio station.

Do you know of any other good site to download free legal music? Do you want to share a song with the other readers? Give your opinions and suggestions a nice home in the comments section below.

Picture Credits: marimoon

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(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.

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