A long time ago, I got hooked on freely downloadable music, thanks to an excellent music review blog, Free Albums Galore, and ever since, I've filled my hard drives with amazing music, created by some of the most creative people I've ever heard. I learned quite a lot from Free Albums. I learned that free music has a cost, and that cost is time (for-pay music has millions of people acting as my filter, sifting out the few songs that are worth listening to). I also learned that there are permutations of musical genres that I thought I knew, which have the capacity to change the way I see the culture of music production. I've bought CDs based on free albums I've downloaded. I've written my own reviews on my existing blog, and generally, I've become as involved in free music as I had time for.
Today, I notice that Free Albums has closed down, and so it seems like a good time to start my own free music review blog. Thinking about why I like free music so much, one of the words that keeps coming to mind is: dangerous. It's dangerous for the studio business model for people to enjoy a free product. It's dangerous for your understanding of the quality and nature of music to listen to a wide range of sources of new tunes.
So, danger is in the title of this blog. Free sounds is also in the title, so over the next few posts, I'm going to introduce everyone to all of the general sources of free music that I'm aware of. After that, this blog will mostly settle down into being a general music review blog dedicated to freely downloadable music.
One note about free vs. pirated music: My definition of freely downloadable music includes any music that's distributed by its creators with the intent that others download it without paying to do so. It doesn't mean that the music is free to then share, though I'll try to point out when that's not allowed.
Pirating music via BitTorrent or other P2P networks is another thing entirely. It's not that BitTorrent itself is a bad thing. I use BitTorrent to download operating systems and updates for software along with some free content that's distributed that way. I love the protocol and the tools, but I'm not encouraging people to pirate music in this blog. I think the RIAA is shooting itself in the foot, and I think that the truly free music out there is a reaction to how they treat their customers, but this blog is about downloading music from authorized sources only!
OK, the disclaimers are out of the way and I'm ready to start reviewing. Let's get to it!
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