Legal Music Downloads - Yes, They Do Exist Outside Of iTunes

I went to one of my favorite sites yesterday, a part of the Internet Archive. Musicians who allow the recording of their concerts (yes, many allow this - including my favorite, Dave Matthews Band) also typically allow them to posted and downloaded by others.

From the etree site:

Welcome to the Live Music Archive. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists’ commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community.

I spoke of Dave Matthews Band: their concert recordings are available at antsmarching.org. This is a community that cares about their recordings, some of the best “fan quality” concert recordings I have ever heard are of Dave Matthews. Bonnaroo fans can get some of the stage recordings here.

Many of the sites, including bt.etree.org/ (lots of Grateful Dead at that site) have gone to sharing files via BitTorrent. If you don’t mind running a BitTorrent client (I suggest Azureus), get busy enjoying these concerts.

If you enjoy live music, visit these sites, download a few concerts from artists you enjoy or better yet, try someone new, broaden your horizons. I certainly have.

Here is a great story about the tech involved in music downloading, flac, shn, mp3, etc.

[tags]music, download music[/tags]