Nine times out of ten, any website that springs up claiming to offer free music is either (1) laden with ads, focused on major label and popular music, and streaming-only or (2) illegal. As great as it is to have a myriad of places where I can go to listen to or purchase “My Life Would Suck Without You” (unfortunately, that’s a real song title) I tend to get more excited about repositories of truly free music that hasn’t already saturated the market. That’s why I’ve always loved OverClocked ReMix, for example, a video game music arrangement website that hosts over 1,500 free MP3s.
So, if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be very interested in the Free Music Archive, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a repository of freely-downloadable, independent music licensed under Creative Commons:
“The Free Music Archive is a platform for collaboration between WFMU and a group of fellow curators, including KEXP, dublab, KOOP, ISSUE Project Room, and CASH Music. The site combines the curatorial approach that these organizations have played for the last few decades, with the community generated approach of many current online music sites.”
Users can browse the archive by genre and access information about each artist, album and track with a single click. The music can either be downloaded or streamed right from the website without the need to create any sort of account (yet). As of now, artists may participate on an invitation-basis only, perhaps as a method of quality control. Despite this limitation, the Free Music Archive boasts over 5,000 tracks already. Thanks to the archive’s wide breadth of artists and its easy-to-use, uncluttered interface, free music aficionados will probably be busy for a long time.
This is FMA Beta! [freemusicarchive.org]
(tip courtesy of Bradley Burr- thanks Brad!)
no credit? for shame, andy =)