[ad_1]

Most of you have probably heard of the RIAA’s quest to crush online music piracy. Illegal sharing of copyrighted songs via MP3 format on the Internet costs the music industry billions of dollars. This is traditionally done using illegal file sharing programs like KaZaa and iMesh. This article explores the legal ways to download and enjoy music from the Internet.

Method 1: Check out free music sites

There are many free music websites that offer free music downloads. These are not your music pirates’ websites – they are completely legal. Don’t expect to find full albums to download, especially if the song is from a famous artist (only music pirate websites allow full album downloads). You will only find a few “teasers” intended to make you want to buy the artists’ CD. Independent and lesser-known artists are an exception – many of them will drop their entire catalog of songs to you to promote themselves.

Here are some of the free music websites that I recommend:

• AMPCAST.com
• Amazon.com digital music downloads
• RollingStone.com
• ElectronicScene.com
• The underground music archives of the Internet

Method 2: buy music online

An increasingly popular way to find and download music online is by heading to legal online music services. The most popular of these is the Apples iTune service. Currently, it offers more than 400,000 songs from the five major labels. Each song is available for a standard price of 99 cents each. Here are the best online music services that I have come across:

• EMusic.com
• itunes
• MusicMatch downloads
• Napster 2.0
• Rhapsody
• Weblisten.com

Conclusion

It’s very tempting to use KaZaa and other file sharing programs to download music – but don’t. If you wrote a song and sold a CD, would you be happy to see millions of people give away that song for free? No. You don’t have to break the law to find and download free MP3 music. There are many websites offering free music – you just need to find them.

[ad_2]

Source by Gary Hendricks