Find Free, Legal Music

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Finding quality music tracks that can be streamed legally on the web has gotten a lot easier thanks to the rapid adoption of the Creative Commons licenses. Several music community sites have sprung up where performers, composers, remixers and mash-up artists regularly post their tracks and make them available for use under one of the various CC licenses, either for downloading, streaming, remixing or all of the above -- all without DRM.
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Contents [hide] 1 About Creative Commons 2 Finding CC-licensed music 2.1 Searching for Creative Commons music 3 Finding legal streams

About Creative Commons

The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization. It provides free tools that creative and academic authors can use to publish their work under terms which allow sharing, remixing and reuse. The publisher chooses the rights they wish to attach to their works.
There are several different CC licenses. The Creative Commons website has a tool you can use to pick the right CC license for your own published works.

Finding CC-licensed music

The major hubs for Creative Commons-friendly music on the web are:
Jamendo: All of the music on Jamendo is free. The artists who upload their tracks there have given permission to anyone to access their songs. All of the songs on Jamendo are published under a Creative Commons license.
ccMixter: This site hosts CC-licensed remixes and CC-friendly songs you can mash up or tweak and sample. The site also has sample packs, loops and a cappella versions of songs you can use to create entirely new compositions.
Magnatune: Music is for sale on Magnatune, but you can stream every song for free first to see if you like it enough to pay for it. The streams are medium quality, but the downloads are full CD quality.

Searching for Creative Commons music

The CC's website has its own search engine at search.creativecommons.org. It will query all of the major search engines for you, and not just for music either. You can look for photos, videos and written works, too.
OWL Music Search offers a more innovative approach: upload a song from your own music library, highlight your favorite part of that song and OWL will search all of the major CC music sites (Jamendo, ccMixter and Magnatune) to find the best matches.

Finding legal streams

Most music sites allow you to stream at least a song or two by artists who maintain a presence there, even if their music is commercially available elsewhere. The streams are generally encoded at a lower bitrate than you'd get if you purchased the track, but it's a great way to discover new artists.
Try these sites:
Last.fm -- Most of the acts here don't offer any CC-friendly downloads, but they do free streaming radio tailored to your listening habits. You'll need to sign up for a free account and pick some favorite artists to get started, or go the extra mile and let Last.fm track your iTunes playcounts to identify your favorite artists and genres automatically.
Magnatune -- Music is for sale on Magnatune, but every song in the store can be streamed.
Know of other sites great for streaming and searching? Log in to the wiki and add them.

This page was last modified 19:18, 24 October 2008 by snackfight.
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Find_Free%2C_Legal_Music