Jamendo

As much as I love finding free music online, I like it even better when I can find some free legal music. Of course, various laws are put into place to prevent you from listening to your favorite band without giving someone money; most notably copyright laws. While copyrighting your intellectual property is all well and good, many artists choose not to put a price on their music; choose not to copyright. These people give their music Creative Commons licenses. While we could talk all day about whether the very idea of a copyright license that offers no restrictions is truly copyright or not, I'd prefer we just agree that the Creative Commons license is a really good idea. The wicked cool thing about Creative Commons is that it's viral. The license allows you to do whatever you want with the music as long as you give credit to the original artist and don't profit from it. However, if you make derivative tracks of some kind (sampling anyone else), your new tune must also be Creative Commons. This means that the number of Creative Commons material can only grow in number. The only problem lies in finding the artists who choose to let you listen in for free.

Not anymore. Jamendo is a neat little site that acts as an archive of all music that has either entered the public domain, or wasn't copyrighted in the first place. While it's unlikely you'll find the next big thing in music, it's almost certain you'll find something to like in the 9104 (as of now) albums for download. While I only discovered it a few hours ago, I've been listening to the Tirpunk album Újra (I'm not sure where they're from, but whatever). So knock yourselves out. You'll need to create an account with a working email address, but once you log in you'll find more techno-goosestep-lo-fi-ska than you know what to do with.

Seriously though, there is a lot of really bad ambient techno on there. Be wary.