Back in the late 90s, finding music online was easy – you just fired up Napster and downloaded away. Unfortunately, Napster was powered by a centralized server, which made it super-easy for the Music Police to shut it down. Since then, several alternatives have popped up, like Bittorrent and the Gnutella network (which powers several different programs, like BearShare, FrostWire, iMesh and LimeWire).
While all these technologies are great for finding specific songs or albums, they all kind of suck when it comes to simply browsing for new music. But fear not: one of the greatest resources for free music lies just under your nose: mp3 blogs.
(Author’s note: most Internet sites call blogs that offer links to free music “music blogs”. I tend to call them “mp3 blogs” to differentiate them from legitimate sites that discuss music. However, for the rest of this article, I’ll call them “music blogs” to stay in line with the rest of the Internet.)
Before we begin, let me first dispel you of the notion that these “music blogs” only offer a track or two from some indie band you’ve never heard of. While those types of blogs certainly exist, the blogs I’m talking about offer full albums from artists you’ve absolutely heard of.
So – how do these blogs work? Well, most of them are hosted on free blogging sites, like blogspot.com or wordpress.com. Some music blogs simply have lists of albums along with links to download the music from file-sharing sites like RapidShare, zSHARE, Megaupload, etc. Other blogs might include professional reviews of the album(s), along with a link to the band’s MySpace page. Still other blogs might focus on one artist at a time, giving a long history of the band in addition to numerous links to the band’s albums and singles. Some blogs focus on a particular type of music (“Jim’s Disco Blog”, “Jim’s New Wave Blog”), while others have a much more general approach (“Jim’s ‘Whatever’s In The Top 40’ Blog”). Some blogs appear to be written by people that are only interested in sticking it to The Man, while others (like a blog that deals only with the B-sides to 80s singles!) seem to be written by true fans that delight in bringing little-known music to fans all around the world. In short, there are literally thousands of music blogs out there, appealing to almost every taste under the sun.
The easiest way to get started with music blogs is to bookmark the following link: Totally Fuzzy. Totally Fuzzy bills itself as “your guide to the music blogosphere”. The site is updated several times a day with new posts from hundreds of music blogs. So all you have to do is visit the site, and when you find something that interests you, click the link to visit the music blog in question. After a few days, you could easily build a list of a couple of dozen music blogs that appeal to you. What’s more, almost every music blog I’ve ever seen has an extensive list of links to other, similar blogs. So once you’ve found “Jim’s New Wave Blog” via Totally Fuzzy, you can check Jim’s site for links to “Alice’s New Wave Blog” and “Bob’s New Wave Blog”.
Once you’re at the music blog in question, you’ll probably see a list of albums (usually, but not always, with a track list for each one) and a download link to a ZIP or RAR file hosted by RapidShare or one of the other file sharing sites I mentioned earlier (if you don’t already have a program on your computer that can extract ZIP or RAR files, now’s the time to get one). Some, but not all, music blogs put a password on their files, which is typically found either in big bold letters on the front page or in the comments section for each entry.
It might be confusing at first, but once you’ve done it a couple of times it gets pretty easy. Keep in mind, though, that many file-sharing services have limits on how much you can download per hour (or per day) and almost all file-sharing services limit “free users” to one download per IP address at any one time. Most file-sharing services offer paid accounts that allow you to download as much as you want, with all the simultaneous downloads your computer can handle. If you try out the music blogs and find that you’d really like a paid MegaShare or RapidShare account, you can go ahead and pay for one, but know that this is completely optional – all services offer some type of free option. Oh, and many file-sharing sites are heavy on the pop-ups and other forms of advertising, so you might want to use an advanced ad blocker when visiting the sites. I use Firefox with AdBlock Plus, but that’s just me.
Just to “throw you a bone”, here’s a link to one of the most popular music blogs out there: Kickr
One thing you’ll probably notice after surfing the music blogs for a few days is that 95% of them seem to be hosted at blogspot.com. So one trick you can do is to go to Google and use the “site:” operator to actively search for a particular artist or album. For example, if you’re looking for Eric Clapton albums, you might enter this into Google:
Eric Clapton download site:blogspot.com
This will return only pages from blogspot.com that mention “Eric Clapton” and “download” on the same page. Chances are that you’ll be able to find free Clapton mp3s within the first couple of links. Not too long ago, Lisa and I had some friends over, and I had my iPod hooked up to Lisa’s computer speakers. The Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ song “Straight To Hell” came on, and one of our guests mentioned that I might like a similar song called “Sittin’ at a Bar” by a band called Rehab. I went to Lisa’s computer and typed “Sittin’ at a bar download site:blogspot.com” into Google. The very first hit was to a music blog with a link to the album, and within 12 minutes I had downloaded the entire thing! It’s almost scary (even to me) how often the “site:blogspot.com” operator will provide you with a link to even the most obscure album.
As I said, music blogs are a great resouce for just browsing for new tunes. But there are more advantages to music blogs that just that. Unlike P2P programs, no special software is needed to get music from a blog (other than a web browser, of course). Music blogs are “platform agnostic”, in that they’re available to any operating system that supports a modern browser. And lastly (and most importantly), using music blogs is much safer than using Bittorrent or a P2P app like LimeWire. Where as BT and LimeWire use your computer to directly connect to other computers (which may be “honeypots” operated by the Music Police), with music blogs you’re only connecting to public file-sharing services. The only way to get busted this way is if the file-sharing service were to have their access logs subpoenaed by a court… which, as far as I know, hasn’t happened in the US yet.