Taking it Easy with Tunes: Free Music That's Easy on Your Bank Account

So you want free music, do you? Well, you don’t want to end up in jail or large fines over pirated copies of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face, do you? Thankfully, there are a lot of sources out there for free, and completely legal, music. Here’s how to boost your collection.

Search Amazon

Believe it or not, you can get some new and popular music free. You can legally get some on torrent sites – but it might take some research and common sense to find music that doesn’t infringe on copyright. You can also point your browser to Amazon.com and check out the company’s free MP3 page. Yeah, it’s a bit of a hunt and peck method to find anything you might be interested in listening to, but it’s also free, so what do you expect.

If you don’t find what you’re looking for the first time through, bookmark the page and come back often. Amazon is always updating this list.

Go For Indie And Artist-Submitted Free Music

Some artists want you to download their stuff and pass it around. That’s the only way they’ll become popular and they’re hungry for the attention. Take advantage of that. For example, many songs on SoundCloud are available as free downloads.

Another site that’s worth surfing is Jamendo. It only offers royalty-free music. If there’s a particular artist or music track you’re looking for, you can also visit the musician’s website. Sometimes they give away free demo tracks.

The Public Domain

The public domain is where all the free music lives. Anything that was written in the last couple of decades, however, won’t be found here. You might think that if it’s free it has to be cheesy. And, while there are a lot of stinky singles out there, there’s also some really amazing stuff too. Check out the International Music Score Library Project if you like classical music. The Library of Congress National Jukebox is another great place to find classic songs.

Archive.org keeps it both free and legal, and has a collection of live music, old 78 RPM recordings, and a lot of music from net labels.

The P2P Trick

A lot of people are afraid to use P2P file sharing clients because of what happened to those unlucky soles years ago using some P2P software and downloading and uploading music that infringed on copyrights.

The newer mainstream companies, like Vuze, actively discourage users from stealing music. In fact, the default meta search engines in the Vuze client are set to sites like Archive.org, and the company tries to educate its user base about copyright laws and intellectual property.

Using torrents, you can download almost anything that’s not protected by copyright, or where the copyright holders have authorized free sharing, and you don’t have to get it from a centralized server. You get it from other users.

Free Streaming Services

Last, but definitely not least, it’s just not worth the risk of stealing when there are free music services out there like iTunes Radio, Pandora, and Spotify. These services are a sort of pseudo Internet radio, allowing you to customize the type (genre) of music you like to listen to. You the user, can vote on each song and even tell the service to stop playing songs that you don’t like. After a while, it “learns” your preferences and only plays music you enjoy. Cool, right?

Katherine Phillips has a knack for maximizing tech's potential. From useful apps to entertainment and file management, she enjoys blogging about the ins and outs of making tech work for everyday users.