The web is awash with free music. Anyone who’s used search engines to search for music will be aware that there’s countless sites which allow you to download tracks and even whole albums for free. So what’s the best place to look for free music ? And should we even be doing this ?
Alright, for starters here’s a couple of free mp3s. First up is a remix of Sia’s Clap Your Hands, with a really dirty, heavy bassline :
Sia – Clap Your Hands (Prince Vince Remix)
We recently featured Delphic, the exciting new dance rock band from north west England. Here’s another new release from them :
These are legal downloads. What the record companies tell us is that illegal downloading is piracy, and is taking bread from the mouths of musicians. But is it really that simple ? You may download something because it’s free, but you wouldn’t necessarily have gone out and bought it otherwise, so you may wonder who’s losing out ? One answer is that those most likely to lose out are the biggest most successful artists. It can actually help newer artists trying to establish themselves if more of their music is out there, being blogged and being talked about. If you become a fan of a band this way, maybe you’ll go and see them when they’re on tour, and who knows, maybe you’ll even get an urge to own hard copies of their cds.
The record labels are continuing to wage war on the pirates, but a few of the artists themselves are saying that this is more about the labels protecting their own business. Thom Yorke of Radiohead believes that the music establishment is dying, and that this would be “no great loss to the world”. His point is that when music used to be something that you bought in the stores you needed big record companies to distribute it, but now that it’s so easy to self-produce and self-publish your music, why should the record companies still take a cut ?
In reality most of the big labels will survive because they’re smart enough to stay one step ahead of the game. Expect to see them finding more and more ways to tap into the free music market while finding new ways of making money for themselves and for the artists. Spotify is a good example of what the future might look like. Set up in collaboration with the major record labels, it’s easy to sign up to, and allows you to listen to large amounts of music for free, while giving you the option to pay if you want to download some of it.
Sometimes the labels will ‘stream’ new albums, usually for a limited period just before or just after their release, allowing you to listen to and preview the songs but not to download them. Among sites where you can listen legally to new album streams are Spinner, AOL Music and NPR First Listen.
Legal free downloads are typically individual tracks which have been officially ‘leaked’ to promote a new or upcoming album. (Whole albums do get leaked too, but this tends to be by unsigned bands, so you don’t really know what you’re getting.) So much new music is being leaked every week that consumers need an easy way to pick out what’s likely to be worth listening to. This is where music magazines and music blogs come into their own.
As it’s easy enough to get hold of music mags, I’ll focus here on the mp3 blogs. The majority of music bloggers respect the artists and their rights and only look to post music which has been leaked from official sources, and will immediately remove mp3s if asked to do so. They tend to focus on music from indie labels, partly through choice and a desire to promote new music, but also because the major labels prefer to keep control of their product and don’t leak mp3s very often.
The thing is to find blogs that you can trust, which focus on the types of music that you like, and which write about things that interest you. Here’s a small sample of the many blogs around :
Potholes on my blog – hip hop, recently expanding into other genres
Bama Love Soul – Alabama based blog with emphasis on soul
Nialler9 – award winning Irish music blog
There Goes The Fear – UK based indie music blog
Love shack baby – Chicago based indie music blog
Digital Eargasm – blog specialising in club music
And I’ll make no apologies for mentioning my own music website, though it’s not primarily an mp3 blog : music to die for.
There are various ways of searching the music blogs to find, say, a particular track that you’re interested in : one method is to use the music blog aggregator hype machine.
Wirralite
