n01getsout

Here are some sites to find free and legal music for downloading (in MP3 format unless otherwise specified). It may or may not be legal to burn these off on a CD. Since I am lazy, I will leave it up to you to find out.

Music Download Sites

Jamendo - A nice site that allows you to stream the entire album to see if you like it, and download it with BitTorrent. There are some truly awful bands on here, but some of them are amazing. I really like being browsing the different bands on this site. Bands from all over the world can upload their music on this site under the Creative Commons licence. Fans have the option to make a donation directly to the artist.

Nugs.net Free Stash - Free jam band MP3s. Plenty of Phish, Grateful Dead, and Widespread Panic as well as some Medeski Martin and Wood, moe., String Cheese Incident, and many more. You can stream the music to your computer or download the MP3s directly.

BT.eTree.org - Live shows from trade friendly artist (mainly jam bands). Songs are mostly in flac or shn format, requires BitTorrent (uTorrent for Windows, Azureus for Linux).

Epitonic - This site has music from independent artists and they try to write editorials about each artists so you can find music that fits your taste.

Amazon.com's Free Music - Amazon.com offers free music from big commercial bands as well as independent bands. Some songs are in WMA (Windows Media Format) as well as MP3.

http://www.garageband.com/ - sign up required - This site allows independent artists to upload their own music. Listeners can download and write their own reviews. Songs stream through a flash plugin and some are available as MP3 downloads.

Music at Download.com - A fairly good selection featuring mostly underground bands with a few big ones thrown in here and there. I like their search engine.

Other Free Music:

Pandora.com - An extremely simple music player created in Macromedia Flash that streams music to your computer. It starts by asking you for a song or artist that you like and then starts playing music that is similar to what you wanted. You can create multiple stations in case you want to listen to different music for different moods. The service is ad supported, although there were not any at the time of this writing.

Yahoo! Launchcast - Use your Yahoo login to create a personalized radio station. You can rate genres, artists, albums, and songs. It plays songs at random and you can skip to the next song if you want. Even has some music videos. Like other Yahoo services, the free version is supported by ads.

EC Brown - Ugly page but laid out according to what type of music it is. Features categories such as Turkish, Old-Time Recordings, Homemade Instruments, and Scandinavian Folk. Nice.

About.com's List - About.com, while having atrocious advertising methods (popups, flash animation bars, opening links in frames), often has good content. This is the case for their free music downloads list, having many sites.

1 Million Free and Legal Music Tracks - A great wiki about, you guessed it, free and legal music.

free.Napster.com - Remember Napster, the file sharing program? They have since become a pay per download service. But they do have a large selection of songs that can be streamed right into your browser on demand. Great if you want to have your friend hear that one song you are talking about. They even have some whole albums you can listen to. Check out their Phish selection.