10 Sites to Find Free Music

Everyone knows how and where to get illegal downloads, but what if we want to stay on the right side of the law? If you cannot or don’t want to stream music from your favorite streaming service, the following sources offer a wide range of music for you to download. Many of them won’t have big artists or the latest chart tracks because they will be under license. What you will find are new artists, out of copyright music or just some creative work offered free to appreciative ears.

I don’t support illegal downloads at all. A lot of work goes into creating a piece of music and the artist deserves some recompense for their time and effort. However, if they offer their stuff for free, I consider it fair game. So with that in mind, here are some places where you can find free legal music downloads.

Jamendo

You may never have heard of Jamendo but it is one of the largest free music portals on the internet right now. With over 400,000 tracks and 40,000 artists, there are rich pickings here. You won’t find A-listers but you will find some awesome music for your workouts or just to listen to. You can also license music for you to use in your own creations too.

Amazon

Unsurprisingly, Amazon wants a big piece of the online music pie and to turn us all into addicts, the online marketplace offers a range of tracks for free. There are currently almost 50,000 tracks available, with many of them from people you have heard of. These are free tasters rather than royalty-free but they are also DRM free and guilt-free so it’s well worth checking out.

NoiseTrade

NoiseTrade is another website that features new artists that offers free legal music downloads. It’s a bit like a social network where artists create profiles and upload tracks. You can freely listen to them and download them and pay for full albums or other tracks are you see fit. You will need to register and enter your email for each download and the site sends you a link but for the cost of a bit of spam, you get free music.

Free Music Archive

The Free Music Archive contains a range of public domain, out of copyright and creative commons licensed music for you to download. You can browse through genres, listen to suggestions or watch the blog for interesting sounds, albums or collections. You can also use social aspects of the website if you sign up which is an excellent way to access other people’s collections.

PureVolume

PureVolume is another website that allows free legal music downloads of upcoming artists and occasionally, featured artists too. It’s part music site and part social network. It allows new artists to publicize themselves, offer up some of their work and get noticed. You can freely download those tracks as you see fit. The website isn’t the prettiest in the world but has a very active community and is updated all the time.

Internet Archive Audio Library

The Internet Archive Audio Library has millions of music tracks, audiobooks, podcasts, radio programs and more. You can sort by type, genre, collections, creator, language and more. There is a pretty good search function too. You won’t find any recent hits here but you will find lots and lots of older, historical or public recordings. According to the site, there are currently over 3 million individual pieces of audio to listen to.

SoundClick

SoundClick is a huge website with thousands of new, upcoming and unsigned artists. You can browse by artist, genre, date, featured artists or songs, or search. It’s quite a sociable site too that offers easy interactions, the ability to share collections, listen to other people’s collections or create your own radio station. It is another site that concentrates more on the content than usability but you soon get used to it.

ccMixter

ccMixter is an audio website that features music created under the Creative Commons License. That means it is free to listen, use, download and even sample should you want to. As well as a huge repository of audio, there are also some pretty good tutorials on mixing and using video in other media. So it not only provides the means by which to add audio to your life, it also shows you how to get the best out of it!

Last.fm

I used to listen to Last.fm back when it was just an internet radio station. Now it has evolved into something much more with Audioscrobbler. A stupid name for a very clever app. What you may not know about the site is that it has quite the free music download capacity. There are loads of genres, artists and some pretty unique stuff on there. All free and all available to download.

SoundHost

SoundHost is a social site where you can download a variety of free music tracks from upcoming and unsigned artists. While not as large as some, it is new and gaining popularity fast. The interface is simple and offers music to download from the Explore window. You can join the site too and create collections, share them and download collections from other people.

Those are just ten of the many places where you can find free legal music downloads. Each offers a wide variety of genres, artists, audio types and so on. Some are social sites where you get more if you join and share while others are just repositories. There is sure to be one here that suits your tastes.

While artists offer their music for free, it’s always nice to give them a little love in return. If you download a track you love, share it with friends and link back to the artist. It will help them pay the rent and allow them the freedom to make more music. It’s only fair.

Do you know of any other websites that offer free legal music downloads? Tell us about them below!