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Free Legal Music Online |
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Free Legal Music Online |
With all the attention on the file 'sharing' networks, it is easy to miss the large amount of music available online that is free and completely legal too. I'm not talking about the brief clips you get in the big online shops either, or some of the absolute junk that is given away because it's nowhere near good enough for people to pay for it.
No, there are some major sources of free music, sometimes by big name bands. I hope this page will serve as a useful introduction, and give you ideas on where to look for more. It's also an area where I'd be very happy to get new links, so if you know a good source, please email me - there's a e-mail link at the page bottom.
Some shops offer much longer clips that the ones you get at the big online music stores. I like electronic music, and both Synth Music Direct, and Farfield do this a lot better, with clips long enough for you to get a feel for the music.
The search engine 'Google' is invaluable in locating this stuff, but the problem is that many of the online shops seem to have flooded the results, such that they are sometimes all you see. Or MP3 sites that don't actually have anything by those artists. A handy tip here is to search for the name of the band you want, plus the word 'listen' - this seems to work much better.
I feel strongly that this approach is a major advantage to new musicians who need the exposure - radio airplay is difficult to get, but if people can get to hear your music directly, its a whole new ball game.
This leads me to the next category:
Individual artists have wildly varying views on the idea of providing stuff for download. Some want to kill anyone who does it, (E.g. Metallica), others offer short samples as taster adverts, still others have a pretty much 'anything goes as long as we aren't ripped off' approach, yet others have special tracks only accessible to members of the fan clubs.
Regardless, it's always worth hunting down the official home page of your favourite musician.
The ambient / techno musician Geir Jenssen, aka Biosphere has enough commissioned works for download to more than fill an audio CD, very helpful given how unusual his stuff is.
Neil Innes, (Of the Bonzo Dog Band, and the Rutles), also has a nice selection of funny and whimsical stuff available for download.
This is a marvellous resource. You will need broadband to get the most out of this, but it really is worth it to the discerning music fan. There are thousands of radio stations all around the world you can pick up on the net, so somewhere there is almost certainly a station that matches your needs almost perfectly. Obviously fans of world music will be in seventh heaven with this stuff!
Here is an index with many live UK radio sources.
There are several variations on the simple 'copy to the net feed' online radio, and they are very interesting - not least because they give big clues where video will be in a few years.
The people who make Music Match Jukebox have a system where you get your own personal audio stream. It's a clever idea - and it also has the option of trying to learn what you like. But the really clever bit is that you can skip forward over tracks you are not keen on. You can't skip the adverts, but they are short, and typically one every third song, so its not that painful.
The BBC seem to be way ahead here, with huge amounts of their radio material available from their web site when you want to hear it. The secret of this seems to be that as they produce so much of their own material, they have fewer issues with net broadcast rights. At the moment its principally shows from the last week, but even that is very handy. It's amazing how much more radio I listen to when I don't have to remember to listen at the relevant time. It's not music but try the Radio 4 listen again page for an idea of what's possible.
The BBC also have a large amount of archive material to listen to, and sometimes watch, (with poor quality video though). There is far too much to list it all here, but try the BBC Listen page
Searching the BBC with their own search service for your favourite band can also be very productive.
It has also opened up the possibility for subscription radio. Now I'm getting away from the completely free aspects here, but it's all expanding the reach of musicians, especially in specialist fields. Hearts of Space is a good example of this trend, with a reasonable subscription giving access to an archive of programs, as well as current broadcasts. An initially surprising mixture of ethnic and space music, no less!
How long can it be before these sort of services get bundled to give even better value to the fan of less obvious music?
If you start doing this stuff a lot, a very useful piece of software is 'Total Recorder'. The full version of this can connect to web sites at pre-determined times, and record the streaming audio for you to hear later. It's very clever and very reliable.
The quality of MP3's is noticeably lower than a CD, and most people can tell the difference easily if the two are played together for comparison. And for digital radio, the data rates (quality) is often noticeably lower than the real thing. If you are irritated by the sound quality of FM radio, you will probably not enjoy online radio or MP3's much. And even if you think it's OK, you will appreciate the difference when you find something you like a lot.
As far as I am aware, the first name band to seriously encourage taping of live concerts was 'The Grateful Dead'. In their case this was taken to extremes, with areas of the concert hall typically set aside for those who wanted to record it!
And there are now plenty of other bands adopting a broadly similar approach, of at least turning a blind eye to fans swapping tapes of live concerts, PROVIDED NO MONEY CHANGES HANDS. Its a great way to put bootleggers out of business.
However in most cases, these files are NOT available as MP3's. You will need to get to grips with SHORTEN (.SHN files). These have the advantage of lossless audio compression, so what you get is what went in. The disadvantage is that they don't compress anything like as well as MP3's. Maybe 40% smaller than the original. While there are programs that will play SHN files directly, it is more normal to unpack them and write them out to audio CD's.
Here are details of using SHN files.
You will definitely need an unlimited download broadband connection to get at these, and plenty of disk space. Though in some cases fans operate 'trees' of people, who are given a set of copies if they agree to make extra sets for others.
Personally I was very impressed with the set of 'Tree' disks from Tangerine Dream, dozens upon dozens, all done with the knowledge of the band. In practice this is way too much material, and it will take literally weeks to download the huge amounts available.
Other big name bands adopting a similar approach are Led Zeppelin and U2. Here is a good place for Grateful Dead music.
How do you locate this stuff? As always, Google is your friend. Try searching for the band name plus 'SHN' - that seems to eliminate the google stuffers rather effectively. Also try adding such phrases as 'fan recordings'. There's also a web site that tries to track which artists accept exchange of fan recordings.
And some taping friendly bands...
Or how about a complete record label?!
There's even a record label so convinced you should try before you buy that they have put their entire catalogue online for free listening! How's that for service?
There is no doubt that the music industry is going through a time of great upheaval. Personally I firmly believe that once the music industry stops attacking it's customers, and learns to live with digital music, there are great opportunities for growth. MP3 players mean that people are listening to music more than ever, and the growth of reasonably priced online music stores can only help. The Internet provides a wonderful channel for artists to deal directly with the listening public, and also make it easy for them to be heard by means of track samples and the like. This should lead to great diversification in what we can listen to, and remove the need for the big labels and their expensive distribution networks. If they can find a way to genuinely help the artists, rather than siphoning off the largest part of the cash from music sales, they will survive. But if they persist in only passing a small percentage back to the artists, then it will be in the artists interest to accept MUCH lower sales in return for a larger share, 9and complete artistic control).
Interesting times!
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