If you don’t want to take the risk of using P2P to download your music, but the economy has got you looking for ways to acquire music for free, here are a few tips to make use your internet speed, wisely.
MPFree touts itself as a completely free service that gives you the opportunity to earn free and totally legal music downloads from your favorite artists. How do you earn them? By giving your info to advertisers–every offer you complete gets you more free song downloads. Because advertisers are paying for it, MPFree is a legal music download site, in compliance with all copyright laws and artist and record-label royalty agreements.
A search for ARTISTdirect comes up with a link promising free music downloads. Once I clicked on “songs,” their free downloads link offers a list of songs that goes on for 22 pages, but I don’t recognize that many artists. So I clicked “Help”. “ARTISTdirect, Inc. is a digital media entertainment company that is home to an online music network and, through its acquisition of MediaDefender, is a leader in anti-piracy solutions in the Internet piracy protection industry.” This doesn’t really answer my questions, so I click on the Play/DL button next to an artist I’ve heard of to see what happens. It goes to that artist’s page, and opens a player, but also has a download button. I’m still not sure exactly how the site works, but downloading free music from this site shouldn’t get you into trouble.
A search for “free legal music downloads” also came up with several other options, so check em’ out.
We’ll look into more next time.