I found a great blog post detailing numerous legal ways to listen to and download music online. From Digital Alchemy via LifeHack:
Free online music used to be like the Wild West of the Internet with services like Napster dominating the field during the bubble. Now, as the Internet has matured, new models for distributing music are coming together.
But who’s going to pay for all this free, legal music? A common answer to this pesky question is advertising, but some justify it as a marketing cost and some are still silent on how exactly they’ll make this “new” business model work.
But the important part is that you can take advantage of their generosity right now by downloading or listening to as much music as you can handle.
There isn’t a music corporation out there that understands how to sell music online in a user-friendly and truly compelling way. (Amazon just nudged ahead of the pack in my opinion with their new digital music store, but they aren’t perfect either).
There are varying degrees of legality, frustration and confusion surrounding the music industry’s conception of how music should be sold and distributed online in this Jetson-esque world we live in. The ridiculous terms & conditions and laughable privacy policies on corporate web servers are idiotic at best (and violations of personal privacy as a worse case scenario).
The concept of a physical medium for music is fading blindingly fast. 8-tracks are only seen in 1970s dream sequences in movies. Cassette tapes are quaint and kitschy like 80’s sit-coms. Vinyl, for some strange reason, is in a trendy resurgence, but still scarce - thanks, in part, to techno DJs. And sales of compact discs are plummeting like our president’s approval rating. Music collections are now measured by the Gigabyte (mine hovers around 40).
The only time I listen to actual CDs is in my vehicle. And the only reason for that is because I don’t have a decent MP3 player installed yet (those wacky radio transmitter gadgets don’t work very well in a city like Houston, filled to the brim with radio waves.)
I would say 80-90% of my music consumption is in digital format. Are mp3s as crisp and vibrant as other formats of music? Probably not. Can I tell the difference? Not really. I just want to rock (like the dudes in Man-O-War from the photo above.)
My entire music collection (several hundred albums) fits onto my iPod with room to spare for contacts, photos, podcasts, notes, etc. I couldn’t imagine carrying a wheel-barrow full of CDs around with me instead of this tiny little device. For convenience alone, digital is the way to go.
What did I do before the iPod? I carried a handful of CDs and a portable CD player when I traveled. It was a pain. Even those little nylon cases didn’t hold more than a few dozen CDs.
What did I do before that? I carried a few 90 minutes mix tapes and a walkman.
What did I do before that? I listened to vinyl albums on our stereo at home and traveled with a small AM/FM radio.
God bless the internet. It has become much easier to find great music; and much easier to wade through the terrible music to find that good music than ever before. So check out all the legal sites where you can download and/or listen to music online legally.
- Dave
P.S. - I haven’t even touched upon all the illegal ways you can find music online. But I would never think of partaking in nafarious methods like that. Really.
