I know people who have GBs of music. No, not 5 or 10 GB; 100s of GBs of music. I bet they never played half of them. Even if they start playing now, the playlist won’t finish in next couple of decades. I’m strongly against the idea of collecting music which I’d never play. Instead, I keep whatever I like and delete rest. No wonder I have just ~700 mp3s i.e., about 3GB. Yep, surprising I know. My entire music collection is just 700 mp3s. All of them neatly organized, tagged with album art and lyrics.

And what’s more surprising is that, half of them are free! Nope, its not like I got them for free (i.e., illegally), Its ‘free’ free. You can get them free, and share them free without any restrictions, DRM or whatsoever and its legal. Welcome to the world of free music. Let me help you to discover some independent music.

My first destination for free music is Garageband. In fact most of my free musics are from Garageband. It has nice music chart for every possible genre. My suggestion would be: go to chart page, pick your favourite genre and listen to top 20 tracks from the chart. I’m sure you will find at least a dozen of good tracks. If I’m not mistaken, you have to sign up(it’s free) to be able to download more than 5 tracks. Also, for some artists, you need to become their fan which is not a big deal.

My second destination is Jamendo. Jamendo has over 10000 albums by 5709 artists covering all types of genre. Most popular tags are ambient, electro, instrumental, experimental, pop, rock, and techno. It has nice online player called JamPlayer, so that you can play any track before downloading it. I also like it’s powerful search feature which allows you to search based on tag along with short based on downloads, popularity, ratings, review and many more. Jamendo distributes music by regular direct download as well as using torrent in mp3 and ogg format. You can easily build up a collection of free music from Jamendo consisting 100s of albums from different genre.

There are few more sites I have not tried yet but I’ll try them out soon:

• Opsound
• dmusic

My next 2 destinations are more of music discovery thingy: last.fm and iLike. I’m sure everyone is familiar with last.fm so lets skip to iLike. iLike is similar to last.fm: social music networking site where you make friends with people with similar music taste and discover new music. ILike is the same company that operates Garageband. So, both iLike and Garageband are integrated. At the chart page, it has 2 sections: Fastest-spreading songs and Fastest-spreading GarageBand songs. From ‘Fastest-spreading songs’ you can get preview for 30 seconds or listen to some full length longs but no download. You can download any tracks from Garageband chart.The biggest drawback of iLike is that it only supports iTune and Windows media player for scrobbing. But who cares about scrobbing? We can at least listen and download chart musics..

Finally, here are some tracks I have in my collection. By the way, I mostly like Alternative Rock, Pop Rock, and Indie Rock. But again I have wide range of music taste :p You can check it out in my Last.fm profile page.

• Some tracks from GarageBand(playlist)
  
• From Jamendo: .Secrets by All:My:Faults; Your Reality by STEEP

Hope you like them..