Chapter 11. Finding Free Music to Download

In the past few chapters, we’ve looked at online music stores—websites where you pay to download digital music files. Not all music online has to be paid for, however; there are a number of websites that offer free MP3 files for your downloading pleasure.

Some of these sites are run by individual artists or recording labels; others are more like a community of artists, where independent musicians gather to promote their wares. Still other free sites are quasi-legal archives where others have uploaded MP3 files for sharing. And there’s a whole other category of MP3 search engines, which you can use to search for free digital music files anywhere on the web.