A link to RIAA

One of my gripes with copyright law is that it's meant to promote the arts and culture. But in my mind, it does anything but, and further limits art and culture. So someone who calls himself RIAA has released an "album" that illustrates the things people could do were they not to worry about copyright laws.

Perhaps the copyright laws are there for a reason, after all.

Free music!

My job here is done! I have found other blogs, doing what I had set out to do.

Well perhaps I won't go away so easily as that, but I have found what I was looking for which was the reason I started this thing--I couldn't find lists of music from people who had shared their music on purpose, to download from those who wanted to be downloaded from.


It is Music
Fingertips
Oddio Overplay
MP34U

So I don't know whether to continue this particular blog or not. Perhaps I will.

*Goes off to flip a coin*

Not what I had in mind--mp3 aggregators

So, I have encountered a great many number of websites that host mp3s. However, these mp3s look to be of dubious legality. They all come with disclaimers saying something like "we will only host these mp3s for sampling purposes only--please buy legal CDs". I'm surprised by this, in part because of the draconian way the RIAA goes after p2p-file traders, and also, how come I didn't know about this earlier?

Rather than link to each and everyone individually, I found a couple mp3 blog aggregators (okay so I did link to a bunch):
http://hype.non-standard.net/
http://elbo.ws/
http://tofuhaus.antville.org/topics/music
http://www.ecbrown.org/linkpage.htm

I also want to point out that http://tofuhut.blogspot.com/ has an amazing list of links for these kind of things.

DJ Mixes : DJ Sol

DJ Sol says:

Feel free to listen to or download my mixes!

Not bad stuff, if I do say so myself.

The Traders Den

The Traders Den is similar to etree.org, in that they distribute, via bittorrent, non-lossy music files of live shows. Unlike etree.org, they insist you register before you go merilly downloading. While it looks like they have interesting stuff, my little brain says "Why use this when etree.org doesn't require registration?"

Song Fight!

Song Fight is website that hosts a weekly contest. They post three things that could be the names of songs, and then people make songs with those titles and submit them, and then there is a vote, and a song is declared a winner!

LegalTorrents

LegalTorrents is a collection of Creative Commons-licensed, legally downloadable, freely distributable creator-approved files, from electronic/indie music to movies and books, which we have made available via BitTorrent.

Music isn't the main focus on this website, but about half of it is music.

WFMU

Before starting this list, I was searching for downloads, figuring someone else had already had done this sort of thing. However, I haven't found it yet. But I have found that WFMU has a blog where they frequently link to mp3s. Some of it is quite interesting, such as the page "Songs of Energy Crises Past", some is silly, which I noticed when I originally found this page through "39^H^H56 versions of Stairway to Heaven".

It's not all music, but it's all enjoyable.

Cajun music mp3

Mission: To foster enjoyment, appreciation, and understanding of the history of Cajun music!

If I were to label things, this would fit in the category of "Abandonware". It's a collection of vinyl records encoded on mp3 and hosted so that people won't forget the music and culture of French Louisana. Similar to websites hosting abandoned software, this webpage has a plea that those concerned with copyright infringement to contact the web author, and has secured permission from a number of them.

I've been listening to this all day, and there are some gems in there, despite the "scratchy record" syndrome. I heavily recommend it!

Don't forget links! Main page, and the mp3 page.

Jonathan Coulton

Jonathan Coulton, who got a bit of fame from Slashdot noticing his "Code Monkey" song, has several songs on his webpage available for free. However,

A few people have pointed out the fact that I have more songs available for free than I do for sale, which is maybe not the best business model. So I’ve reorganized this page into more of an online store - you can buy single songs and whole albums through Paypal or with a credit card. I’ve just recently set it up, so I hope you’ll be patient if there are any problems. If anything weird happens just let me know and I’ll fix it. You can also buy a CD if all this makes you uncomfortable.

So go give him a listen, and if you find yourself singing along with him in the car, you can help him find his new career by buying a download or two.

Also notice he has five songs available for a Popular Science Soundtrack, that I guess is meant to go with one of their issues.

etree.org

etree.org (the torrent tracker) is a webpage for trading recordings of shows which the musicians allow the trading of recordings. I'm surprised I didn't mention it earlier as I had known about it and assumed that everyone into live shows knows about it.

No registration required for just downloading torrents. Note that almost all of the files available from bt.etree.org are not in mp3 format, but in shn or flac formats. The use of lossy formats is heavily discouraged on etree.org. For playing in iTunes or Winamp, either you will need to find a plugin or convert to mp3 or wav.

Banned Music

bannedmusic.org is, well, let me quote them:

Bannedmusic.org is a peer-to-peer collaboration that makes it impossible for the major record labels to ban or censor musical works. When record labels send legal threats to musicians, record stores, or websites, we will post the music here for download and publicize the censorship attempt. There is a clear fair use right to distribute this music, and for the public to decide whether current copyright law is serving musicians and the public, they need to be able to hear what's being suppressed.

At this moment they only have four albums, Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds by Various, The Double Black Album by Cheap Cologne (A mix of Jay-Z's Black album and Metallica's Black album*), The Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse (A mix of Jay-Z's Black album and the Beatles White album), Illegal Art Compilation by Stay Free Magazine.

The first three are available by BitTorrent, and the last you have to click each song individually.

* (political rambling) I vowed never to listen to Metallica again after they made big anti-Napster noises, since they clearly don't want me listening to their music. I'm not sure how I feel about remixes, but I imagine they don't want me to listen to this either. I haven't.

Planet Persia

Another odd mention is Planet Persia. An expat community website for Iranians in Germany, they have quite a good download section of Persian DJs, many remixing reggaeton of all things. I like the music a lot. The website is only available in German, though the songs are in so many different languages I'm not going to list them here.

Registration is required. Navigation of the site is a bit of a pain. It looks easy, since the home page lists top songs and new songs, as well as the sidebar that says "Downloads", but you have to click "Downloads", then click on the artist, then the song. But since there are enough gems in there, it's worth it.

I'm not sure it's 100% legal, since there is a lot of DJ remixes of popular music. I suspect they are not fully sanctioned.

Singing Science Records.

Probably not what you are looking for, and probably not 100% legal, but I need to mention Singing Science Records. Sing these songs to all your friends and you might get wierd looks, but it's fun! I give these songs two thumbs up!

From the webpage:

When I was a kid my parents got this six-LP set of science-themed folk songs for my sister and me. They were produced in the late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret (William Stirrat) and Lou Singer. Zaret's main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic "Unchained Melody" for the 1955 movie "Unchained", later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in "Ghost". Three of the albums (the best three in my opinion) were performed by Tom Glazer, semi-famous 1940s folk musician and somewhat of a lyricist himself (he wrote "On Top of Spaghetti").

The Singing Science lyrics were very Atomic Age, while the tunes were generally riffs on popular or genre music of the time. We played them incessantly.

In February 1998 I found the LPs in my parents' basement. I cleaned them up, played them one last time on an old turntable, and burned them onto a set of three CD-R discs. In December 1999 I read the songs back off the CDs and encoded them into MP3, so now you can hear them on the web. They are available at either 32 Kbps (about half a megabyte each) or 160 Kbps (about two megabytes each). The higher-quality MP3 versions were encoded by Ron Hipschman.

Loca Records

Loca Records has a flash heavy, script heavy website, but if you can navigate that, you can get to the mp3s. Personally it's the type of thing that would send me back to the p2p sites. In fact, I've only listened to one track, since it was that much of a pain to get to.

Krayola Records

Krayola Records has mostly noise tracks. All mp3s. Not a lot of them. Poor review from me, but included because you might enjoy it.

Khavi Collective

The Khavi Collective (alternate interface), is a collection of Creative Commons shared music. I haven't looked too far into these songs, but it looks promising. From the webpage: "sound has the power to make the world a better place"! Entire archive available on DVD for $26, if clicking on each song individually drives you crazy. Mostly techno/electronica.

Jamendo

Jamendo is a record label, where all the songs are available for free download. Mostly French, but lots of wierd stuff. Can download full albums via BitTorrent, and also can listen to streaming mp3s.

A lot of music, I have not listen to the entire archive yet.

iRate

iRate is the first thing I will post about. As I have already said, the idea behind iRate is a wonderful idea. It has a database of free songs around the internet, and what you do is rate what you think of the songs it automatically downloads for you. It tries to get an idea of what music you like, and comparing your tastes with other people's tastes, tries to download things it thinks you might like.

iRate has a number of advantages over web pages and lists like this. The first, which I really appreciate, is no fiddling with "Save link as..." or dealing with archives. Instead, there is a menu item that simply says "Download more music", and it does just that, without even asking you what kind of music! Quite lovely.

The downside (to me) is that I found very little I liked. :(

Nonetheless, I heavily recommend trying out this program. It's a little rough around the edges but is definately something I am looking for.

About this blog

This blog was started by a single post to another blog I maintain, which can be found here. The basic idea is that I like music, but I have gotten spoiled and don't like paying for it. Further, I know there are many people, places, and institutions that want me to download their music and listen to it, whether or not I pay for it. So rather than be on the bad side of the RIAA, I'd rather have a list of people who want me to download and listen to music, and this list will be links to such download pages.

There you go. I hope this is useful to you. It may supplant some bookmarks for me. And as a warning to those who go to the above link, I will duplicate some entries.