Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Jun 06, 2006

Back when I was in college it was easy to get great music. There were no CD burners, no napster, and recording CD's to tapes had lost its appeal. We were relegated to physically walking down to the local record shop and buying a disc that we wanted. It really wasn't that big of a deal to me because chances are that I had a friend who had the disc already and so I had listened to it a few times before figuring that I wanted to own it. With so many like minded people around me, I was exposed to a lot of really great tracks most of which I loved but some I didn't. It was the perfect situation.. Awareness, Trial, and Purchase-only-if-desired. Things are different now though and since my college days are long past, I need a way to get my music without risking wasting money. So where does one go to get free music without resorting to piracy?

There are quite a few sites I like to visit in order to grab free music. My first and foremost is the Audiofile section on Salon.com. These guys carefully find some of the best free tracks online and point them out. Complete with descriptions so you don't have to worry about wasting your bandwidth or your time, let alone your money.

Another great site is Better Propaganda. I think I also discovered this one via Salon. Here you can even build your own mini-radio station and play tracks one after the other. Recently the selection of music available for download vs. just listening seems to have decreased. But maybe I'm just not doing something right. Wouldn't be the first time!

Last but not least is a great new Digg-style site built on Ning. It's called CC Hits where the CC stands for Creative Commons. You guessed it, all these tracks fall under the Creative Commons license. Fully featured with tags, registration, and voting this is going to be something to keep an eye on.

Next up I'd like to see a place for Music Videos released under a Creative Commons type license. For the moment we'll have to be satisfied with Pearl Jam.