This page gives you some links to websites where you can download music. The idea is to find music that is NOT licensed under normal copyright. A lot of musicians are now relaeasing their music under alternative licenses, such as creative commons licenses. The license allow artists to retain some rights, while granting you the possibility to legally download, burn and use their music in a non-commercial context (the creative commons license is now the most commonly used for free music on the web but there are some others, such as the Free Art License, and there is still, also, the Public Domain).
There are now thousands of netlabels on the net, releasing daily hundreds of virtual records (you can download music, but also sleeve art). We will not attempt to list them all. At least not today...
A good starting point to find some of those labels is the netlabels page of the archive.org project. There are many of those, and I guess it wouldn't make any sense to tell you which ones are my favourite. Just go and listen. Some of it is crap, some of it is great and it shouldn't be too long before you find something you like. If you don't want to browse by label, you can also have a look at the list of music genres. The list is an interesting read in itself : as the users can add whatever genre they want, it is rather compelling (electro-organic anyone?). It also gives a good idea of the basic imbalance of the music-on-line community : thousands of electronic recordings, not as many rock or metal or whatever you want recordings.
Some netlabels exist only there, on archive.org (such as Bird Song or Microhertz). Of course others have their own websites, so here are some of them just to give you an idea:
Thinner/Autoplate
Observatory online
Monotonik
Comfort Stand records
Miasmah
Prison Soup records
Hippocamp.net
Textone
Clever music
Ideology
Slapart
Phil Scrotum Production
Stasis field
Hazard records
Embryo recordings
Entity
Another record
Imaginary albums
and many many others...
Other websites function as communities where musicians/users post directly their stuff. There are some great things in the opsound open pool, for example. The people using opsound fit more or less in the noise/experimental category.
A very active community is the belgian Electrobel, which is more electro-techno oriented. About 2500 songs, not all of them excellent, so you will need a little bit of patience to explore it (it's sometimes worth it).
Phonography is a group whose aim is to collect field recordings.
Let's also mention the copyleft site www.copyleft.be: lots of links there, a "copyleft logo" and a more general scope (not only music).
When a website says nothing about the license or terms of use of any content, it is de facto copyrighted. So, when browsing, you should look for explicit mention of a creative commons or free art license. Tracks under creative commons are often accompanied by a logo like this one :
On another page : a list of copyleft radio programs, both inside and outside of the radioswap database.
I can add more information to this page, please send suggestions to :
pierre
at
radioswap
dot
net