Music downloads are available on numerous sites on the internet. There are sites where you can pay a low lifetime membership fee and have access to unlimited downloads, such as Flikrmusic.com and FindAny MP3. Some sites that will let you listen to music and not download. Other services include Limewire and torrents for free downloading. Some torrents offer legitimate downloads. There are some sites that offer free music sheets for download. http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/lichtmann/downloadsindex.html
This website includes links, blogs, and a question and answers section to help you in your search to find songs. In addition, specific links and approaches you can take for downloading are given to improve your ability to access the songs that you want. BitTorrent clients for downloading MP3 songs are also suggested. A featured video on how to use Google to find music for downloading on the web is also below.
Free Music Download Sites That Are Legal
These are sites that are great places to get free music legally. They are not front sites (spam) like ez-tracks.com (which fronts for Kaaza):
- Madeloud.com - An Underground Music source.which represents little known independent artists. There are over 30 genres available that include underground music from indie rock, rap, punk, hip-hop, and hardcore rock, as well as mainstream rock, country and gospel. http://www.madeloud.com/music/free_downloads2
- Notesunderground.com - These two music geeks have 89 Nu Music series as of April 4, 2010, which you can download as audio podcast to your iTunes or you can do mp3 downloads. http://notesunderground.com/3
Music Download Sites With Bad Customer Feedback
Each of these sites has had significant complaints regarding the value of the services and problems associated with using the service:
- Kaaza - McAfee assures it is ok, but customer feedback is unfavorable. http://music-download-review.toptenreviews.com/
- BearShare - many uses report that viruses also accompany their downloads http://www.myspace.com/harry_hizzle http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061023023220AAUkr25
Discount Music Downloads
If you want to pay the lowest price for songs, consider using some of the following services for song downloads. (Current pricing as of 12/10/09) http://music-download-review.toptenreviews.com/
How to Use Google to Find Music Downloads Quickly
This demo shows you how to use "Google Operators" within the Google search engine to quickly and specifically find what you are looking for. The operators used in this demo are "site" and "inurl." With the site operator you can find the specific type of site that your are looking for, and with songs, you can often find them on index sites, so on the search line you would enter "site "index.of", for instance to get the these sites. In some cases you can find a lot of spam sites, but you can narrow the search down by adding "(mp3)" to find mp3 files only or you can only look for edu (educational) sites by extending it to "index.of (mp3) site.edu. By adding a specific song to the search you can narrow down the search even more, example: "index.of (mp3) site.edu "radiohead.creep" ".
Copyright Material
Be cautious when you are doing music downloads. Sometimes the material is copyrighted. It is illegal to download copyrighted material without permission. See the RIAA's website for more information. www.riaa.com/
References
Fast Facts
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Problems with free download services
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Recommended legal free download services
Fingertips, ArtistServer, Jamendo
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Legal Torrents
YouTorrent, LegitTorrents
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BitTorrent Clients for downloads on PC machines
uTorrent, Vuze, BitTornado, BitComet
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BtiTorrent Clients for Mac
Vuze, Transmission
