Visit the music store of your choice. Almost every major online music outlet has a wide variety of free tracks available for download. These are often single songs off of a full CD, or songs from new artists. Downloading these free songs is completely legal. This means that the music is free to download for personal use. Visit a music community website. A growing trend in digital music is the use of music streaming websites. Some of the more popular sites are BandCamp and SoundCloud. These sites let artists upload music which visitors can stream and sometimes download. Oftentimes, new releases will have a limited number of free downloads available before you have to purchase the track. When you select an album, click the Free MP3 link to download the songs. All of the music is completely legal to download. You can search by artist or song name, or browse through genres of music looking for new tracks. These sites often feature remixes of popular songs that can be downloaded or streamed for free. Go to the front page of your chosen site. Online mixtape communities adhere to standards that keep their mixes above-board, so you can download without fear of legal retribution. Sign up, if necessary. Find the area of the page where you can log in to the site. On DatPiff, it's on the right side of the main page, a little ways from the top. Browse these first to ensure that you can get as much new music as you want each day. Find the artists you like. Track them down on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and through their website. Become a fan of their social media pages and sign up for their mailing lists. This will ensure that you have the most comprehensive coverage of the artist. Many bands and artists have a presence online that you can follow via social networking sites like Facebook, or by joining a mailing list at the artist's personal site. People who show their allegiance to their favorite artists are often rewarded with free downloads of new radio singles, demo versions of songs, rarities, and live session recordings. Visit free music sites. There are a variety of sites and blogs that offer free MP3 downloads. Besides general music sites, there are a wide array of blogs dedicated to specific genres of music. For truly legal, free music, look for sites that release music under the Creative Commons license, or host music in the public domain. Search for a song. Browse the songs on the front page, or enter a song or artist name into the search bar at the top of the screen to search for specific tracks. These ads tend to be misleading and can lead to dangerous or intrusive software downloads. Very rarely do they lead to more free music. On most sites, song data will be displayed next to each result. Some of the files will display a play time, file size in Mb , and bitrate. Choose one you like. Generally speaking, mp3 files range from 60 to 320 Kbps, with higher numbers meaning higher quality. CD quality sound is 256 Kbps, radio quality is 192 Kbps. This is useful for users that don't have a lot of storage space on their computer or MP3 player, but want to have as much music as possible. Downloading too often may cause YouTube to ban your IP from accessing any further YouTube content. Probably the most popular way to share songs and albums over the Internet is through torrents, which are files that direct your computer to copy bits of a target file or folder such as an album from other torrent users until you assemble a complete copy. Torrent is a small, fast, and reliable free torrenting program. You can download it at. This means that if you do not legally own a copy of the song you are downloading, that material is considered pirated. Double-click on the file you downloaded to run the installer. The installer will most likely want you to install search toolbars and other extra software. You can choose not to install any of it. There are many sites that aggregate and list torrents for you to search, since torrent files by themselves aren't illegal. Go with the files that have positive comments and ratings — others may be misleading or dangerous. Download the torrent file. This file should be very tiny — only a couple dozen Kb or so at most. This is because the torrent itself is just a set of instructions telling your program what to do. The torrent should open automatically once it has downloaded, otherwise you can open it through your torrent client. Consider leaving the torrent up. Once you've downloaded your music, you can unpack the files and listen to them at your leisure. At this point, it's considered good etiquette to leave it in your list so that others can download parts of it from you, but you don't have to. Find a community that shares music. Most larger community-created websites such as Reddit have one or more dedicated music communities. Lurk observe quietly and learn the community etiquette before you post. The appeal of using a forum is that they are much less likely to be taken down or pursued by authorities due to the members-only nature of forums. Download music over a file sharing network. File sharing is the act of trading files directly with other users. Soulseek is by far the safest and most reliable file sharing client available for free. It also provides access to one of the widest selections of music anywhere on the Internet. Programs such as soulseek do not scan for viruses or prevent users from sharing malicious files. It is up to the user to download safely. Providing music for others to download also increases potential charges against you. These programs are typically safe because they are community patrolled, but be aware that there is a legal risk in sharing music you do not own. Set a folder of music to share with other users. Most Soulseek users won't let you download from their libraries unless you share some of your own. You don't necessarily have to share your entire library, although it's considered polite to do so. Find and download music. Click the Search tab and enter your search into the text field. Hit enter to see results. Check the bitrate on the right side of the results and the file format MP3, M4A, and FLAC files can all be found on Soulseek , and if you like what you see, double click to download the file s. You'll download everything in that directory that is, everything you see in the album folder. You can close these when you're done with them. Click the Transfers tab to see two more tabs, Uploads and Downloads. Downloads shows you what you're currently downloading or waiting in line to download. Uploads shows what files, if any, other users are downloading from your computer. If your entire album list stays light blue for too long, try right-clicking and choosing Retry Download to kick-start it. Most users have a set number of downloads they allow at a time. This means that there is often a line to get the file you want. You'll see a progress bar on the right, as well as a bitrate indicator for the transfer. Higher numbers mean faster downloads. There will also be a full progress bar next to the file name. This can happen for many different reasons. Wait until the rest of the songs have finished downloading, and then retry any red downloads before searching for them elsewhere. You can right-click the file and select Retry. You may want to consider streaming music directly through the Internet instead of downloading files. This allows you to instantly listen to songs over the Internet without using up your hard drive storage space. FM are a few popular websites that offer free audio streaming. YouTube is also a good choice for streaming specific songs, as long as you don't mind video accompaniment.
