The 20 Best Free & LEGAL Music MP3 Download Sites

Welcome to my collection of the 20 Best Online Free MP3 Music download sites that is totally free AND LEGAL (YES, free legal music mp3 downloads)

Like the most of us, buying music can get pretty expensive after a while, especially when you have a couple of teenagers involved. Nowadays I just let them surf these sites (after they finish all of their homework of course!) and download to their heart's content.

The advantages for me are obvious; less visits to the music store (saves on gas, time and more importantly MONEY), and it keeps them occupied enough that they stop bickering and actually discuss their favourite music picks.

With the all the news concentrating on stolen music, people tend to forget there are many sites giving away songs and albums for free.

These are my top 20 choices in no particular order, with tons of content to burn or play on your iPod or mp3 player, enjoy!

Amazon music store

The free download is a little hard to see as amazon is offering lots of music to sell but its located on the left column midway down the page. A neat little trick for those using firefox browser is to click ctrl+f (control find) and type in "free" and it will lead you right to the download. The free download is rotated constantly so check back often

thesixtyone

One of my favourites, plenty of free downloads and the instant play /streaming feature is excellent!

Ruckus

A novel approach targeting college students; over 3 million free downloads to anyone with a .edu email address. An impressive number of University's around the world (Clemson University, UK, OSU, Vanderbilt University,etc..) have all partnered with Ruckus to offer all students on or off campus to download free music legally and virus-free.

BetterPropaganda

BetterPropaganda's features include free and legal downloads (there are 1,000s of them), reviews, interviews, streaming audio and video, and similar artist recommendations

Last.FM

Besides the streaming audio it has a weekly chart of free mp3 music downloads

PureVolume

Widely recognized as a top social music site, (reviewed in NY Times, Newsweek,Wall Street Journal and other publications) new and emerging artists get to promote themselves and offer their music free if they so choose

E-Z Tracks

Over 30,000 free songs or browse MP3 music downloads by category through their partnerships with the record labels. Registration required.

SpiralFrog

Over a million legal free songs, however it's NOT compatible with Itunes or Zune players plus the Spiral Download Manager must be installed on your PC ( it allows the Web site to download music to your computer). Well worth the hassle in my opinion , as it has lots of goodies and its free

Free Albums Galore

The site has entire albums which are free to download, good site to get not only the album but a in-depth review of the artist's album. Their searchable album archives go back to July of 2005.

ccMixter

ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want

funkyRemixes

Ah..oldies and new stuff from artists like BeastieBoys, Chuck D, etc... all remixed into free downloads for you; site features focuses on Hiphop, Rap, Rock and Electronica styled remixes

LegalTorrents

You will need a bittorrent client in order to download from this library of legal content, recommended torrent clients from the site are : http://www.utorrent.com/download.php (for pc users) and TRANSMISSION http://www.transmissionbt.com/download.php for Mac OS X users

MP3Raid

The site states it has over a million songs free and legal to download, I obviously can't verify the number but they have a lot of top artists and recent songs available for free

Cnet Download

Over 10 thousand free mp3 music downloads available; it's not just a techie software site!

AmieStreet

Mostly independent music from artist uploads from free to $.98

The Internet Archive

Tons of copyright free music stored for future generations (my favourite: hundreds of popular songs from the early 20th Century found in the 78 RPM collection )

Epitonic

Offers a comprehensive selection of what's playing on college radio stations and music magazine, great for younger crowd (younger than me that is!) music seldom heard before. Plenty of free downloadable tracks ; rock, electronic, hip hop, folk, hardcore, world, experimental and more

MP3 4U

Kind of like a people search engine, members search the net for their favourite tracks and upload it to the MP3 4U website (artists also upload their work ), where it can all be downloaded for free; lots of indie stuff

ArtistServer

If you like Electronica its here, all for free, what's I like is the free download ringtones section

Emusic

They normally give you 50 free songs for a signup subscription (not what I did), but they now have a music discovery toolbar (which you must install) to receive a free MP3 song (chosen by their staff) download everyday -that 365 songs a year. The toolbar is useful for searching their over 3 million plus song base and the web, and comes with a free radio station; note: on the bar itself it will sometimes have a marketing button which will be a shortcut to a sponsor

For 10 more free and LEGAL music download sites that didn't make my top 20 but still worth looking at, please click HERE!

Thanks for reading my hub!