The Internet has bought with it mass data sharing. Why pay $20 for an album you can just download off the net at your whim without paying a single penny. However, just like all businesses, music industry runs for a profit and if they were to give out songs for free over the Internet, all commercial music would collapse. Illegal downloads are now being recognized as cyber crime with a few arrests of teenagers made over the past years for illegally downloading music! Sure free load is welcome but jail isn’t. The answers to your music needs are free and legal music streaming websites. These give out music for free download, earning their revenues through advertisements, a part of which is shared with music owners like artists and recording labels.
Free and Legal streaming websites are many. Lets kick start our discussion with Deezer which had a partnership with Sony BMG and now with Universal studios too. It offers music for free download and embedding in third party sites within a social network. Coming next is Spotify, an equally good (and free!) legal music streaming website. However, it is available only in UK, Spain and a few Scandinavian countries.
Another absolutely free streaming service is provided by GrooveShark which also allows WordPress integration of its content along with FaceBook embedding. Tunerec is another free (but rather slow in updating content) streaming service which sources all its music from recording radio play. Lala plays its songs through an interface in web browsers. You can even buy additional songs that may not be available for free. The price is a measly 10 cents per song download.
Last.fm and Pandora are free radio streaming websites that allows you to customise a radio station for yourself. Another free radio streaming service is provided by Slacker. The Hype Machine streams music for its users from blogs of various recording labels. Following a more limited approach, 8 Tracks lets the user compile 8 songs into a playlist. Then there is the good old Muxtape.
There are several others that you can look into like Sound Cloud, MP3 Tunes, MusicPlayer.fm. While looking for a free music streaming service, it is best to huddle by the most popular ones because you do not know if an obscure site claiming legal music is actually running a scam. Free music streaming is a good and now legal way of discovering new bands and meeting like-minded people. Never has music been so accessible and cheap.