I'm assuming you mean some form of legal downloading, otherwise you'd risk getting the administrative people here in trouble, in addition to yourself. So, on the topic of legal free downloads... well, Myspace is a good start, since there's a fair few bands who put songs up for download there. Hell, my stuff's up there. Another good thing along the same vein - although specifically for bands - is purevolume.
The EC Code of Conduct item 20 says: If you are looking for illegal downloads then this isn't the place to discuss that. If you're looking for legal free downloads, as suggested by Jeimuzu, then of course that's fine to discuss.
I don't know about places to download, but if you want to listen to stuff, you can try last.fm, imeem, the Hype Machine, or Pandora. Those are the sites I use.
Amazon allows you to preview the tracks (usually 30 or 60 seconds of them) on CDs. This is useful for trying to decide whether to buy the CD (whether from them, elsewhere, or as a legal download) if you've only heard a couple of tracks on the radio. I find this feature useful and have based decisions on whether or not to buy a CD on these samples, plus some assistance from the comments left by other buyers.
Yea, I'm not 100% sure about the legality of youtube coverter, I think it is illegal to download music of their at least, tho!
I've come to believe youtube is legal because they say they will take down videos if the author says so and they have no automatic way to allow you to download things.
There are legal differences between watching a video from a website and downloading it for watching offline. The same with streaming audio etc. This is why sites like YouTube do not have download links.
So its OK to have audio streaming on this website from any artist? Unless they tell you specifically not to? As long as you cant download it. just wondering.
That depends if the upload to YouTube was in accordance with YouTube's rules and didn't breach the original copyright. Often it's impossible to know. It may have been uploaded by the record company or artist as a promo, or it may have been recorded from TV or ripped from DVD and uploaded as a pirated copy. If it's a current song that you would have to buy on CD or legal download, then it is reasonable to assume that any method of obtaining it without paying for it would be illegal. A lot of online radio and TV stations with live streaming and "listen again" type features (such as the BBC) only allow listening/watching and not downloading, specifically for copyright reasons. They often only allow access to IP addresses in their own countries too, because they only have rights to broadcast in that country.
Legaltorrents.com is a really good site to use. It is a torrent site, but it is all public domain, legal material. A lot of the files available are live shows that are released by artists, or radio shows, similarly released.
There's a bit of info about it here http://www.mono211.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?board=legaltorrents There is also a list of Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents here http://newteevee.com/2007/03/03/ten-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrents/ I don't know anything about those sites - I just found them by Googling
My friend at college used to use something called Morpheus, I'm not sure if it's legal or not though. I use napster just to listen to music online so don't really download anything.
I think Morpheus is a peer-to-peer file sharing thing like Limewire. If so then it's almost certainly illegal.
