Almost everyone has
heard about the massive crack down on Internet music piracy that has
been occurring over the past few years. Napster was taken down (although
it has now returned as a pay service), other file sharing programs now
require users to pay for a license and the RIAA and other similar
organizations are doing their best to hunt down copyright offenders and
put an end to their crime sprees. The consumers on the other hand argue
that their actions hurt nobody, that there is no damage done to anyone
by their not purchaseing an album. Furthermore, they claim, MP3s allow
them to sample a CD before purchasing it, thus actually helping sales.I'm
not here to argue the pros and cons. Basically it's not worth it, as
neither side of the argument will ever see the opposition's point of
view. What I'd like to do is take a look at the completely free and
legal alternative to 'stealing' music. Those wonderfully talented
musicians who are willing to put their creations online to download for
free, solely for the joy of spreading their creations to the masses.
Free
music is surprisingly easy to come by, even music by famous bands.
Sometimes it needs to be 'streamed' from the Internet, meaning that you
can only listen to a song while you're online, but with the ever-growing
popularity of broadband Internet this is really no longer a problem.
Sites such as MP3.com and purevolume.com provide free music by almost
any band you can think of, although there is a large amount of it that
has to be streamed and not downloaded. A search for 'free legal MP3
downloads' will reveal a huge number of pages to visit.
For
something specific, try visiting the artist's website, or the site of
their record label. These will often offer a few sample tracks to
download for free. It's not quite as convenient as having access to
every song that you want, but it's not a bad alternative.
But how
about we forget about the mainstream for just a while and move towards
the alternative? Towards the hopefuls, the talented bands that have yet
to be 'noticed'. There are a huge number of these smaller bands out
there that are sticking their stuff online for any and all to listen to,
just so that they can be heard. These can be easier to find, because
most MP3 sites will be filled with these smaller acts. A great place to
start is http://www.garageband.com/ or the aforementioned
http://purevolume.com
The great thing about smaller bands is that
you can often find bands that come from your local area and then go and
see them play live. Being able to see a favourite band live more than
once a year (or lifetime) without expending huge amounts of money and
time is pretty cool. Many music search engines will let you search for
bands of a particular genre in a particular area, which makes it all
quite easy.
A fairly major contributor to the online music scene
is the remixer. These people take other tunes and redo them, often in a
techno style because one person can do this competently. Chief among
the tunes selected to be remixed are those old ditties that used to play
through the simplest of sound chips on now aging consoles: the video
game theme songs. People now go and grab the main tune line from an old
favourite and fill it out, making real the work our imaginations used to
do for us to turn the single tone melodies into orchestral
masterpieces. A few good places to start are http://remix.kwed.org and
http://remix.overclocked.org as well as a personal favourite band
http://machinaesupremacy.com
I hope this has given you something
to think about. It's not hard to come across illegal MP3 rips, in fact
it's often hard to avoid them, but if you give the free music scene a
look you may find something completely different and new that will
really do it for you. With web hosts already being penalized hugely for
illegal content being stored on their servers (having an entire server
taken down because of one inconsiderate user is damaging and irritating
beyond belief) and moves being made to charge ISPs for the content being
accessed by their users, it makes more sense than ever to get out there
and grab yourself an awesomely original and completely legal music
collection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Punch
M6.Net Web Hosting
http://www.m6.net
Daniel
Punch is a University student gathering a large music collection to keep
himself going during those long nights of 'study' (also known as
'playing video games')
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