A lot of people today are claiming that the cost of recorded music is approaching zero. I tend to agree. That’s one of the reasons that I make my own music available for free. Although I am not really a fan of P2P file sharing and pirating music over the internet, I have found that there are a lot of places to find interesting music for free online, legally. I thought I would share some of my personal favorites here.

• The Ibiblio Library: Here you will find a huge amount of recorded material from around the world. My personal favorites are the Puzzling Music Archive, Pandora, and Gamelan Nyai Saraswati (I really can’t resist a good gamelan ensemble…)
• Steve Layton’s “Click Picks”: Music picked out by Steve Layton, a composer with a keen eye for interesting talent.
• ccMixter – The Open Source Alternative: I have actually spent a lot of time here lately. While a lot of the music uploaded here is kind of pop/electronica oriented, there are definitely some interesting artists here. It seems like it is still a relatively small community, all mixing each other’s music and sounds. If you are interested in free samples (smaller snippets of recordings, as opposed to songs), you could also try their sister site, Freesound.
• The Avant Garde Project: This interesting project digitizes out of print albums of 20th century music, and includes composers such as Morton Subotnik, Ben Johnston, John Cage, Harry Partch, Toru Takemitsu, Luciano Berio, Pauline Oliveros, and many others. I have not yet had a chance to sample the music here, but I am looking forward to it. Be warned – the native format here is FLAC, so if you don’t know about it you might want to read their technical information page.

Hopefully some of this information will help you find some new and interesting music. Let me know if there is anything out there I have missed.