Illegal file sharing has become a huge problem for the music industry, with recent surveys suggesting that over 50% of music on the iPod's of 16-24 year olds has been obtained illegally. I can even admit to once being a regular user of torrent sites, a practice that I stopped after becoming a writer and becoming passionate about the protection of the creative industries. The good news is that there are ways of getting music for free without breaking the law, a godsend for those that have developed an awareness of the effects of illegal downloading, just read on to find out exactly how!

Last.FM the popular music streaming site has a wide variety of free legal MP3 music which have been permitted by the artists/record labels. The mp3's available include tracks from main stream artists such as Moby, Nine Inch Nails and Alexandra Burke; as well as tracks from less well known and up and coming artists. There are around 250 free legal mp3 downloads at any one time.

emusic offers a free trial to any Internet user during which you can download up to 25 MP3 tracks of any artist; cancel your account before the end of the 14 day trial and you have a fair bit of completely free music! Forget to cancel your account however, and you will see a hefty monthly subscription come out of your account! emusic has a fantastically large catalogue.

Many people know that PureVolume has a massive catalogue of tracks that can be streamed, just like Last.Fm, but very few people know that a huge 100,000 of those tracks can be downloaded in MP3 format. Yep, that's right..... there are 100,000 free legal mp3 music downloads from PureVolume. You have to search for it, and you will encounter a hell of a lot of very poor music, but the quality tunage is there to be found!

ArtistServer - Artist Server has 7,000+ MP3 tunes to download, these are not mainstream artists and instead artists trying to create publicity for themselves and get themselves known. Some of them are brilliant, more of them are rubbish. If you enjoy searching for new music, then this is a good place to start!

LiveMusicArchive - The Live Music Archive is a huge database of live recordings from a range of artists from a long period of time. Some great live sets from the likes of David Gray and others. Well worth a look.

Amazon.com - Yes believe it or not, Amazon provides free legal music! I didn't know this until recently and it is incredibly hard to find, unless of course your read a fantastic hub by me.... who provides you with the Link to this Amazon Free Music. It sticks a few more on each day.

iTunes- Unless you haven't already worked it out, iTunes actually does offer many free tracks. Mostly these are of unsigned or up and coming artists, but you never know what you might find!