Free Music Downloads, Free Mp3 Downloads | ||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Top most popular songs
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top most popular songs | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Michael David Crawford
February 2, 2007
I've been a happy customer of the Seagull Networks web hosting service since 1997.
I decided to write this article after a friend told me in all sincerity that the money she paid to purchase Kazaa went to compensate the artists whose music she downloaded. She had no idea she was violating anyone's copyright.
I figure that most peer-to-peer file traders, while probably aware they are violating copyrights, aren't much more clued in than my friend. While I have your attention I feel I should also explain some of the legal and historical issues around copyright, and suggest steps you can take to make file sharing legal.
If you don't think that violating copyright by downloading music with filesharing programs like Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, Madster, eDonkey, Direct Connect, OpenNap, iMesh, or Gnutella could get you in serious trouble, then you need to read RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Against File Swappers and House Bill to Make File-Sharing an Automatic Felony.
The RIAA is using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to force internet service providers to turn over the names of file traders. They can determine your internet protocol address by connecting with your peer-to-peer client over the Internet. Using your IP address and the time you were connected, the ISP can determine your name. If the RIAA finds you this way, they will sue you.
When you are the defendant in a civil lawsuit, you don't have the protection against self-incrimination that the U.S. Constitution grants criminal defendants. You will be required to give a deposition, in which the party suing you will be able to ask you anything they want, while you will be required to give truthful answers under oath. In addition, your friends may be subpoenaed and compelled to testify as witnesses against you.
In civil lawsuits, there is a process called "discovery" that allows the party suing you to use the force of law to require you to turn over any evidence they ask for. In particular, they can seize your computer and forensically examine your hard drive (so that they might even recover files you've deleted), read any logs of email you've saved, obtain your telephone records from your phone company and obtain the log files from your ISP as well as the log files from any Web sites you've ever visited.
The RIAA has had limited success at suing the publishers of file sharing software. Some systems, like Gnutella, are so decentralized that there is little hope of finding anyone to sue. So now they are coming after the individual file traders - meaning you. The article above says the RIAA has already obtained subpoenas against 871 file traders, and will likely have obtained many more by the time you read this. They are asking for $150,000 in damages from each file trader for each song whose copyright they have violated. What will they use the money for? Suing more file traders, of course.
If you lose one of these lawsuits, the only recourse you will have will be to declare bankruptcy. If you're a juvenile, your parents will have to declare bankruptcy.
While simple copyright infringement is a civil offense where the copyright holder's only recourse is to sue you, especially egregious offenses are already criminal violations for which the law enforcement authorities will arrest, prosecute and imprison you. Remember the FBI warning you always see at the beginning of movie videos? It is common for large-scale software pirates to be arrested. File traders are next in line.
You can avoid all of these problems by enjoying music from the tens of thousands of talented musicians who offer legal downloads of their music. And you can tell the RIAA to kiss your ass.
It's difficult to find music that's actually worth listening to. Although many bands offer music on their websites, there's no real way to tell if it's any good without actually downloading it. The labels do serve the (somewhat) legitimate purpose of picking out the good from the bad. But we can do that ourselves with legal downloads by using collaborative filtering, for example by downloading our music with iRATE radio, which you'll find at http://irate.sourceforge.net/:
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from Web sites which allow free downloads of their music.
As of July 2003, the iRATE server has 46,000 tracks registered.
The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.
One nice thing about iRATE is that you can set it to download continuously while playing, so you always have fresh music without having to go hunt for it. You just have to click a button from time to time to rate new songs.
iRATE radio is a cross-platform program, with natively compiled clients presently available for Windows and Linux. There is a Java WebStart client that works on Mac OS X and likely on other platforms that support Java.
The music iRATE downloads to your hard drive will sound better and better the longer you use it. iRATE's statistical analysis is more effective when more people use it, so be sure to tell all your friends.
iRATE radio is a young project which welcomes contributions from java developers. Anyone at all can help out significantly by testing the development snapshots and reporting bugs. Graphically talented people may enjoy submitting mockups for iRATE's upcoming user interface redesign.
[top]
Another way to find music downloads worth listening to is to let others do the work by reading the music reviews several web sites offer. One such site is Fingertips, which calls itself "An intelligent guide to free and legal music on the web".
Each week Fingertips reviews several free music downloads. Rather than trying to be an exhaustive source of music downloads, Fingertips tries to select a few of the very best.
In the email with which Fingertips author Jeremy Schlosberg introduced me to his site, he said:
At Fingertips, my emphasis is on quality music, and whatever trouble I may have with the record industry at large, I also have a whole lot of trouble with the idea that anyone with an instrument who wants to upload music to the web is worth listening to.
Another music review site is Gods of Music: "Music Reviews for the Independent Music Scene". There are many reviews on the site: their Hall of Fame lists the very best, and their Dungeon lists the worst.
Gods of Music accepts requests from artists who wish to be reviewed. In return, the artist is asked to place Gods of Music banner on their page. The artist must agree to certain terms to get a review. One is that the artist must be willing to live with whatever review is written, even if it is bad. On the other hand, a good review can be good publicity.
There's more at the site than just reviews, so it's well worth your time to check it out.
Here are some other web sites that provide reviews of music downloads:
Updated January 31, 2007
There are many legal music hosting services that allow one to find a lot of free music all in one place. Be aware that the fact that a website offers free music does not imply the files are licensed for sharing - many sites forbid sharing in their terms of service.
At one time the largest free music repository was MP3.com. Thousands of independent artists hosted their music there for free download. But when Vivendi sold MP3.com to CNet, the largest music library in the history of humanity was taken offline. While it was compared by many to the burning of the ancient Library of Alexandria, most of the work was not lost to civilization. It just became harder to find. MP3.com now offers only paid music downloads, but many free music sites sprang up in its wake.
The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 43,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer free music.
The Narcopop Independent Musicians Directory lists the websites for many artists and provides preview samples for many of them.