Here’s a quick roundup of some of the websites where you can find the music that you love for free. The market for these kind of websites is exploding so it’s definitely not a complete list but it should give you a good start.
1) BeeMP3.com
BeeMP3.com is a mp3 search engine. The BeeMP3 crawler searches through the Net and indexes all the brand new and popular songs. They claim to have over 800,000 mp3 files and are adding 10,000 mp3 files daily.
2) Blip
Blip is a quick way to tell your friends what song you’re into right this minute. You also find out what your favorite people are listening to in real-time — no need to refresh the page. TechCrunch called it “Twitter for music” and that seems like a good description.
3) Critical Metrics
Critical Metrics is a database of highly recommended songs. The site keeps track of awards, hot lists, must lists, 5-star reviews, artist picks, testimonials, select discographies, and other notable on-the-record expressions of love and enthusiasm.
4) Deezer
Based out of France, Deezer offers, free of charge and legally, all kinds of music, from rock to hip-hop, jazz, electro and world music.
5) Free Albums Galore
Free Albums Galore is a full-album “mp3 blog” for listeners of eclectic music. You won’t find a lot of popular artists here, but the site posts only complete albums, not individual or scattered tracks.
6) Free Music Zilla
Free Music Zilla is a tool specialized for social music downloading. It lets you download free music from almost all of the social music services, including many on this list. It is not available for Mac unfortunately.
7) GrooveShark Lite
Grooveshark gives you the ability to find and listen to any song and get personalized recommendations. It has an excellent, easy-to-use interface.
8) Hype Machine
The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.
9) Imeem
Imeem is a social network that offers access to a wide range of media including music, video and photos.
10) Internet Audio Archive
The Internet Audio Archive contains over a hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by its users.
11) Jango
Jango allows you to create a custom radio station just by typing in an artist’s name. You get the music you want, along with similar favorites of Jango users who share your taste. You can customize your station by adding more artists and rating songs that you want to play more or less.
12) Last.fm
Last.fm is one of the most popular custom radio sites. It also has social networking features and the ability to choose specific songs for a playlist. Unlike many sites on this list, Last.fm saves some of its best features for premium subscribers who pay a fee for the service.
13) Musicovery
Musicovery is a unique website that lets users choose which songs to play based on things like mood, genre, and musical era. It has a unorthodox interface that shows songs in relation to each other creating a kind of “music map.”
14) Music Search Online
Music Search Online is a mp3 search engine. Each result has a link to listen to the song or download the mp3 to your computer.
15) MuxTape
MuxTape is a simple way to create and share mp3 mixtapes. Anyone who signs up for an account receives their own subdomain (ex. http://samplename.muxtape.com/) which makes it easy to share the collection with friends and family.
One of the most popular music sites on the Internet, Pandora is great for finding new music. The site’s database has the Music Genome Project at its core which contains in-depth information on each song (up to 400 attributes, including melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, and lyrics). You can create as many custom radio stations as you want, but you’re not able to play specific songs on demand.
17) SeeqPod
SeeqPod is a media search engine. It allows you to find, play, and enjoy the vast multitude of rich media files and applications available online, including video, audio, slideshows, Adobe Flash files, and more. The interface is somewhat cluttered however. It’s worth noting that SeeqPod’s database is used to power many other music sites, including several on this list.
18) SpiralFrog
SpiralFrog is an ad-supported Web site that offers over 700,000 songs for you to download.
19) Skreemr
SkreemR is a search engine for locating mp3 files on the web. They have a feature called AudioRank which helps suggest the version of each song with the highest quality.
20) Slacker
Slacker is a custom radio station site with an emphasis on letting people access their stations in many different places.
21) Songerize
Songerize is a simplified interface for the SeeqPod music search engine. The site describes itself as “SeeqPod’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button”, which is about right. You can get to the song you want to hear very quickly, all you need to do is enter the song title and the artist name.
22) Songza
Songza is a music search engine with the ability to create playlists and ranks results by quality. It has one of the best user interfaces of all the websites on this list.
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