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Free, Legal Music Online

Almost everyone has heard about the massive crack down on Internet
music piracythat has been occurring over the past few years. Napster
was taken down (althoughit has now returned as a pay service), other file
sharing programs now require usersto pay for a license and the RIAA
and other similar organizations are doing their best to hunt down copyright
offenders and put an end to their crime sprees. The consumers
on the other hand argue that their actions hurt nobody, that there is no
damage doneto anyone by their not buying an album. Furthermore, they
claim, MP3s allow them tosample a CD before purchasing it, thus actually
helping sales.

I'm not here to argue the pros and cons. Basically it's not worth it, as neither
side of theargument will ever see the opposition's point of view. What I'd like
to do is take a lookat the completely free and legal alternative to 'stealing' music.
Those wonderfully talented musicians who are willing to put their creations
online to download for free, solely for thejoy of spreading their creations to the
masses.

Free music is surprisingly easy to come by, even music by famous bands.
Sometimes it needs to be 'streamed' from the Internet, meaning that you
can only listen to a song while you're online, but with the ever-growing popularity
of broadband Internet thisis really no longer a problem. Sites such as MP3.com
and purevolume.com provide free music by almost any band you can think of,
althoughthere is a large amount of it that hasto be streamed and not downloaded.
A searchfor 'free legal MP3 downloads' will reveal a huge number of pages
to visit.

For something specific, try visiting the artist's website, or the site of their record
label. These will often offer a few sample tracks to download for free. It's not
quite as convenient as having access to every song that you want, but it's not a
bad alternative.

But how about we forget about the mainstream for just a while and move towardsthe alternative? Towards the hopefuls, the talented bands that have yet been 'noticed'. There are a huge number of these smaller bands out there that aresticking their stuff online for any and all to listen to, just so that they can be heard. These can be easier tofind, because most MP3 sites will be filled with these smaller acts. A great place to start is http://www.garageband.com/ or the aforementioned http://purevolume.com

The great thing about smaller bands is that you can often find bands that come from your local area and then go and see them play live. Being able to see a favourite band live more than once a year (or lifetime) without expending huge amounts of money and time is pretty cool. Many music search engines will let you search for bands of a particular genre in a particular area, which makes it all quite easy.

A fairly major contributor to the online music scene is the remixer. These people take other tunes and redo them, usually in a techno style because one person can do this competently. Chief among the tunes selected to be remixed are those old ditties that used to play through the simplest of sound chips on aging consoles: the video game theme songs. People now go and grab the main tune line from an old favourite and fill it out, making real the work our imaginations used to do for us to turn the single tone melodies into orchestral masterpieces. A few good places to start are http://remix.kwed.org and http://remix.overclocked.org as well as a personal favourite band http://machinaesupremacy.com

I hope this has given you something to think about. It's not hard to come across illegal MP3 rips, in fact it's often hard to avoid them, but if you give the free music scene a look you may find something completely different and new that will really do it for you. With web hosts already being penalized hugely for illegal content being stored on their servers (having an entire server taken down because of one inconsiderate user is damaging and irritating beyond belief) and moves being made to charge ISPs for the content being accessed by their users, it makes more sense than ever to get out there and grab yourself an awesomely original and completely legal music collection.