Where to Find Free Legal Music and MP3's Online

Who said you can't get legal music online for free? Below are some of my favorite places to download free legal MP3's and stream music on the Internet. You actually might be surprised at where you can get free music from. Some of the sites you may have never even heard of before. Now that The Pirate Bay has been shutdown and the owners put in jail, users are wanting more alternatives to TPB and many are wanting legal ways to obtain music.


Free Online Streaming Music Sites

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Last.FM
Last.fm is a social streaming site that provides you with music that you will like, based on the music that you listen to. For example, when you land on their homepage you will find a box that asks; "What music do you like?" and here you can enter an artist of your favorite band or even your favorite song by an artist. Last.fm then puts its magic to work to find similar arists and beings streaming the music. Usually the first song played will be by that arist and you can 'Love the Track' to better enable Last.fm to learn what you like.

When I entered 'Creed' as an artists, the site streamed artists such as Scott Stapp, Audislave, Staind, and 3 Doors Down. One of my favorite things about Last.fm is I get to hear music from bands that are sometimes less known but they are exactly what I like to hear thanks to Last.fm's ability to determine the type of music I like.

As always, with any free service - you will have banner ad's but it's really not too annoying and nothing that AdBlock can't take care of :)

Pandora
Pandora is very similar to Last.fM but I find Pandora a lot cleaner and a bit easier to use. Having registered for a free account at the site, when I hit Pandora.com it automatically loads my 'Stations' and starts playing music that I like. What I love about Pandora is the ability to easily create 'Stations' of your favorite music. For example, I may have a station for rock and another for more energetic club music. Like with Last.fm, Pandora has the ability to vote up music you like but it also have a feature to thumbs down music you don't like. If you thumbs down something, it won't play it again for a while - if you thumbs down an artists so many times it will never play songs from that artists again.

Like with Last.fM Pandora is supported by Ads on th site and also about every 20 songs you may hear a short commercial. Not too shaby at all if you ask me. I probably like Pandora better than Last.fm. Both of the services allow you to share your music tastes with other users.

Live365
If you are looking for a more traditional 'radio station' to listen to on the web, then look no further than Live365. This site has over 6,000 Internet radio stations to choose from that are ran by real people, not computers. This is definitely a good site for real stations but the downside is you will be subject to more commercials, much more than the previous sites mentioned. I personally haven't listened to a whole lot of music from this site but I thought I would include it in this article for those of you who might be looking for a more traditional music streaming site.



Download Free MP3's Online Legally

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Amazon.com
Amazon might be one of the few places on your list when thinking about free music but they actually have nearly 1,000 free songs on their site and a lot of them are really good artists. The site makes it very easy and quick to hear music that you might be interested in. Free legal MP3's are hard to come by, but Amazon.com makes it easy to find free songs on their site.

Jamendo
Jamendo is a community of free, legal, and unlimited use music published under Creative Commons license. This means you can pretty much download and share with anyone you want. This is a great way for new artists to get their music out there and also a great place to find new up and coming artists.

Contribute To This Article
Know of a quality site that has free 'legal' streaming music or mp3 downloads? Let us know!