More Music Sites (Part 3)

I started a little series here of sites for you to find legal music. This is part three of it. My goal is to contiue to post more sites and information from time to time and, hopefully, comments and e-mails will allow it to grow. I doubt I will ever be able to create a comprehensive directory of such site for the Internet and the current legal environment are far to turbulent and dynamic. Who knows what will come next?

Furthermore, the fact that I must earn a living, eat and sleep makes it impossible for me to have the time to actually try all of these services. The best I can do is read reviews, browse around, and look over TOS. Mostly I need feedback from readerso of the services. Therefore, I am doing this as a series and moving rather slowly. Nonetheless here are five more useful resources for you audio lovers out there.

I suppose no list of music sites is complete with out the mention of Napster. This pay service does offer DRM free music and has over 6 million tracks available. Individual songs are 99 cents and entire albums are 10.00 dollars. Both prices are, in my humble opinion, fair prices. They offer both signed and unsigned artists and monthly membership options.

While mentioning the "biggies", I should mention Amazon. They offer all kinds of music and it is DRM free. There are also some special deals (look for the link on the page) which, if you scroll down, include some free tracks.

If you are into free and cheap (like who isn’t?), you may wish to surf over to Amie Street. This membership site uses and interesting concept of all tracks starting out being free or cheap and then increasing in price up to 98 cents based on popularity. They state that they offer over 1 million tracks. The site is very easy to navigate and offers a number of filtering options for you. They even allow you filter it so you see only the free tracks. I also notices that many of the songs had rather high sampling rates.

Artist Server is a free site with lots of Creative Commons music available. You do not need to join this site to download the music. It, however, requires the musician to pay tohave their material on the site. I have already found a few artists to add to my Pick of the Day just by browsing around for about 15 minutes. I found MP3s with sample rates of up to 320 kbps. I also like the fact that the CC license information is clearly displayed. If you are a podcaster, you will likely discover some new artists here.

Okay this last one for today caught my attention because I think Better Propaganda is a great name for a music site. I did not like the navigation as much as I did the last two sites I mentioned but it was not too bad. I also couldn’t find anything under CC license. Nonetheless, I did find some 128 kbps free MP3s. All in all a decent site.