Free music!

I found a great source of music the other day. Or rather, I knew about it for a while but the other day I discovered that they had a client embedded in the default music player of Ubuntu (Rhythmbox) it has, at this point, approximately 100000 free titles in all genres and languages. Though I did notice a certain bias towards french and german music, but that might just have been the store focusing on european music since thats where I'm from. All the music is free and distributed under a creative commons copyright license.

The quality of the music is surprisingly good. I immediately found a french artist called amandine that I really liked, though I still have no idea what she is actually singing. Any frenchspeakers that would like to download her album and try?

Jamendo survives mostly on donations but the user is not required to donate to be able to download. There are no DRM restrictions so the music can be listened to on any device. I know I'm sounding like an ad for Jamendo but I just feel that when someone in the music busyness finaly does the right thing they need support. And who knows, you might find some music by some artist that is absolutely amazing and that you would have never found otherwise. The address is http://www.jamendo.com/

If free things make you nervous and you want to pay for something then you might want to visit http://www.magnatune.com/. They have a very small catalogue of handpicked music of very high quality where you can pick your own price (but you do have to pay something.) Their artists get a good deal since they get half the money you pay (as opposed to 2-5% with the four big labels) Oh and did I mention they have it written in their license that you are allowed to share the music you bought with up to three people! And they are not involved with the RIAA, which alone should make the user experience that much more pleasant.

There you are. Two great sites for discovering fantastic music that is not being played on the radio or sold in the record stores.