Streaming music

You can find pretty much any song or piece of music you want on YouTube:

http://uk.youtube.com/

Even some of the big record companies have now taken to posting music videos to YouTube to broaden their audience.

If you register with YouTube you can create playlists to play songs back in the order you want rather than having to search and click every time you play a new track. 

Last.fm lets you stream a very wide variety of music and lets you build up a library of your favourite songs if you register and log on. It also recommends other music you might like based on what you have been listening to. You might want to ignore the blandishments to buy CDs and iTunes tracks though:

http://www.last.fm

This article from the Guardian compares various online music streaming services with digital downloads:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/11/digitalmusic-downloads

Spotify

I suppose you can't really talk about free music on the web without mentioning Spotify. If you signed up to Spotify a while ago then you will find that you can stream pretty much any track you can think of for free with an advert only every fifteen minutes or so. The free service was in fact so good that Spotify had difficulty getting anyone to sign up to their £9.99 per month subscription service without the ads. Given that the ad model is not that different to commercial radio you'd have thought that it should prove viable, but of course that fails to take the greed of the media moguls into account, who still insist on charging Spotify a fee per track listened to. The only reason they agreed to work with Spotify in the first place was that they were so disgruntled with Apple's dominance of music downloads (and obviously upset in King Cnut fashion at illegal teenage downloading - just as they were thirty years ago with home taping - despite all the evidence that teenagers who download the most for free also buy the most recorded music). Still, you'd have thought that after almost a decade of refusing to accept  the reality of the internet they'd have wised up by now and started to accept the need for new business models. But no - sign on to the free Spotify service is now by invite only. Which means  that if you want to stream music you're better off using YouTube (which is of course, in the shape of Google, a steamroller every bit as powerful as the media conglomerates themselves) or last.fm, which funnily enough belongs to CBS. 

I'd also agree with the author of the following article, that there is something vaguely indigestion-inducing in the commercial all-you-can-eat model:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/11/spotify-hairy-cornflake-gillian-welch

This article provides an excellent explanation of the issues facing music streaming sites:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/music-too-expensive-to-be-free-too-free-to-be-expensive

When I was at school musicians used to wander around with stickers on their instrument cases with the motto "Musicians say keep music live!". Perhaps they had a point.

This article from the FT has an interesting take on re-valuing music:

A day for savouring the sound of silence

Update: according to this article in the Telegraph, Spotify will no longer require users to have an invite for their free service, but listening will be limited to twenty hours a month:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7735597/Spotify-opens-up-to-free-users-but-caps-listening-hours.html

Free, legal music downloads

There have been some very widely publicised cases of bands releasing albums for free on the web - the best known probably being Radiohead's In Rainbows. Radiohead said they wouldn't be doing it again, but there are still some other very well known bands making their albums available for free on the web to promote themselves and their gigs, for example Nine Inch Nails:

http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup

There are also well known classical musicians doing the same thing, for example the violinist Tasmin Little:

http://www.tasminlittle.org.uk/free_cd/index.html

Bandcamp is a site designed to help musicians promote their music on the web and offers free downloads:

http://bandcamp.mu/

Have a look also at:

http://www.last100.com/2007/08/17/10-sites-for-free-legal-music/

Films

Archive.org has over 140,000 films you can download for free. Quite a few of them you'd probably pay not to watch, but there are some watchable old classics in there as well:

http://www.archive.org/details/movies

Archive.org also has hundreds of thousands of audio recordings and texts available for download:

http://www.archive.org/index.php

Record music and video on your computer

Audacity is a free application for Mac, Linux and Windows which records whatever you are listening to on your computer. You can download it here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Kaffeine (for Linux) will let you record digital TV and radio programs to your hard disk if you have a digital TV card for your computer. See our phone and TV page.