You can enjoy free music without risking trouble by downloading the legal music that many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves.

However, it can be hard to find, and there is the problem of finding music worth listening to without actually downloading it and listening to it all.

Please enjoy my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.

Besides helping you to enjoy free music downloads, my article explores the history of copyright law in the United States, and suggests a number of steps you can take to make sharing files - any files - legal.

Thank you for your attention.

A lot of work went into that great article! Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I am sure that it will be referred to by many on this forum.

~Crabby

Thank you. That's very kind of you to say that. I did work hard. At the time I wrote it last summer, I was very determined for it to be the best thing I had ever written.

I have a favor to ask of anyone who reads it: simpy, how can I make it better? Are there more sites I should link, or other things I should talk about?

I've started working on an update to the article, to reflect a lot of what I've learned since I first wrote it. I wrote the section called
Online Music Download Reviews just last night, and you can see from the note there that I'm not quite done with it.

I'll be working at it from time to time over the next week or two. You can either email me suggestions at legal-downloads@goingware.com or post them here and I'll come back to look for them.

I have though of another way you can help me, if you like my article and want more people to read it.

After studying my web server logs this morning, I'm asking readers to Googlebomb my article by linking to it with the phrase free music downloads

If lots of people linked my article that way, then a google search for free music downloads would turn up my article near the top of the list. I'm asking for that particular phrase because I have found it was the top search engine query for my article, by the number of referrals it got in January. This was the case even though it has a better rank for lots of other keywords. Free music downloads must have generated so many referrals because people are searching for that phrase much more frequently.

I discuss this in more detail in my Kuro5hin diary.

For another example, try a Google search for "miserable failure". The results you will get on any given day depend on the shifting front of a battle between the American left and the American right.

Note that I didn't write the article for any commercial business. I write software for a living, and the article has nothing to do with that. I wrote the article because I wanted to help the sort of people who read this forum right here become better informed and empowered politically.

Thanks! -- Mike

thank you very much Mike for superb article u have written . I hope it will be a big hit in near future ...

Wow--large primer on music downloading! Nice work!

I don't see it mentions Newgroups as a means of music trading though. That's a real easy and secure way of music distribution that too many internet users are just unaware of.

Tek.

I'm starting to work on an update, so I'll look into adding the newsgroups.

However, is there any particular way to be sure an MP3 posted to the news is legal?

Are there moderated binaries groups?

In general I could use any suggestions you may have for improving my article.

TekWiz Newsgroups are awesome sources for music. I have used them ever since a friend showed me how. That may be why they are not so well known. Anyone can fire up P2P. Newsgroups were harder to use I think for a newbie. I never will forget the MadHatter versions of Agent and IM ing with friends on ICQ at the same time. Lol

Mike, I don't fool with the groups that much anymore for binaries and when I do I am looking for something very rare or out of print. Just upgraded to a new system and don't even have Agent installed yet. But I am going to tomorrow as I wonder if there aren't some legit groups out there.

Having said that, did you know you can download free music from Winamp that has a free license that runs for 30 or 60 days? It is not a lot to dl yet, but it is a hell of a good idea. 96 kbps WMA. They also have video and streaming that aint to shabby. I just found it yesterday or today when I dl'd Winamp 5.02

http://www.winamp.com/music/

Maybe enough publicity and it will pick up steam. Temporary free license I like that idea, it is something that indies could use to get their works out there.

The newsgroup usage volume just keeps expanding all the time. No matter how much storage newshosts add, people just manage to fill it. Many ISP's news servers only hold about a day or two of binary posts. But premium news provider http://easynews.com strives to keep binaries for at least 30 days. When they add storage they sometime get to 48 days but within a few months retention dwindles to 24 days at which time they add even more storage. We're talking about terabytes. Rooms full of hard drives...

I've been using the newsgroups since 1992 using a Unix shell--I decoded binaries and sent them to myself over Z-modem. Hehehe. All I knew before then was local dialup private BBS's.

Then I moved up to Agent.

Interestingly Forte (Author of Agent) now offers their own news service for a pretty good price.

These days I still use Agent when I can but some groups have so many headers on them on easynews that recently Agent is unable to even retrieve the headers at all!!! One of the minuses of using servers that store that many days.

But luckily Easynews has a fantastically simple and easy web interface with global search and a zip system where you can mark what you want and download it from the web browser and a zip file.

Download speeds are phenomenal. I get 1200KB/sec on my cable modem. That's almost a FLOPPY DISK per SECOND! I can easily download a whole CD's worth of data in less than 10 minutes.

Easynews does cost $10 for 6 GB or 30 days. There are many other services that have much better deals. (But maybe not the web-interface).

However if I keep on top of things I can always download a lot from my cable providers news server as well.

Also, now to some of the binary groups there is an IRC and web "support system" where there are groups of people helping fill in requests through an automated IRC-Website posting system.

It's amazing how much newsgroup traffic and popularity has grown and still there are so many people who are just totally unaware of it all.

This is much better than the P2P networks where even on fast connections you are limited to the slow upload speed of most internet users.

MichaelCrawford: There are some moderated groups on usenet but I don't know if there are any moderated music groups.

But I suppose bands can post their music to newsgroups if they are not signed with any record companies. And they can include their website address, so people who download their songs can go to the website and buy albums, etc. and find out about concerts.

BTW, I noticed that on the newsgroups there is a tendency to post complete albums more than just individual songs.

The newsgroups contain just about anything--pictures, books, software, music, and lots of information. The newsgroups remain the fastest, most efficient and secure way to spread information around the world.

http://groups.google.com is a great place to find answers to any questions one may have. Whenever I have a computer problem I go there and I usually find the answer!

Tek.

This website should be on the front page ! Excellent work !

Well thank you.

I notice you're a moderator. Maybe you can ask the people who run the site to post a link on the front page.

Alternatively, they could copy the entire article to CDFreaks' articles section. They already have permission to do so, as my article has a Creative Commons license.

Hi Mike,

You've got mail!

~Crabby

Got it.

I'm very interested in what you have to say.

I need to contemplate it some more.

Mike