Music
Loads of people are making cool music and giving it away on the internet these days. So rather than giving the RIAA a reason to sue you, download music by people who want to give it to you. Here are some of my favorite places and bands to get music from.
If the staggering list of files located at these sites overwhelms you, I suggest reading Song-A-Day, a weblog where I link to a free song every day. Subscribe to it and get the link conveniently handed to your feed aggregator every day.
Music Websites
SongFight.org is a weekly internet music contest. Each week the site announces a new title. Contestants have a week to write, record, and submit a song with that title. After a week, the fightmasters anounce a new title and post all the submissions for the general public to download, listen to, and vote for their favorite. Whoever gets the most votes gets to brag about it to all their friends.
The music quality and style varies quite a bit, but most of it is actually pretty bad. If you want a quick guide to the best stuff on the site, check out the winners of the fights and the Fightmaster's picks from the last fight. Or look for the individual bands I mention below.
According to the site itself "Oddio Overplay is predominantly a catalog of neat-o websites that offer legal and free sharing of music." They link to a lot of artist's and label's pages, with a short description of the kind of music you can expect to find there.
CC Hits is an excellent place to go to hear free music. The hits section presents the songs that have gotten the most approvals by Ning users, and it's a good place to start. The recent section is a much larger list of the songs that have recently been submitted ("recent" is used kinda loosely).
Make no mistake, there is a lot of bad music on CC Hits, and a lot of repetetive electronic stuff. But there's also a surprising amount of excellent music to be heard there.
Band Pages
One of the best things about Song Fight! is that Song Fight! makes State Shirt make music. The LP he's selling on his webpage is well worth getting, but the music in his Song Fight! Archive page is more varied and often better. To get a good sample I recommend Straw Man, Less of You, Anomaly, Black Hole, Gonna Be Your Man, and Upcoming Downtime.
Chances are if you know anyone on this list, you know MC Frontalot. He is credited with coining the term "nerdcore hiphop", which pretty much sums up his style of music. He has two CDs for sale and a bunch of songs for free. He also goes on tour sometimes, and having seen him live twice, I can say that his show is highly entertaining and worth seeking out.
Puce is my favorite amateur internet musician. Listen to his Song Fight entries. Download some more songs from his blog.
Brad Sucks is a one man band with no fans. His album I Don't Know What I'm Doing has sources available for remixing.
The Apartment makes fun electronic music.
Brother Machine has an impressive backlog of music for download on his site, but his Song Fight! entries are more consistently catchy. Don't miss his Song Fight! entries submitted as Seth, Sassy Molassy, and War of the Worlds.
The website is simple and doesn't give much information, but it does have eight excellent indie rock songs to download.
Josh Woodward makes a lot of Creative Commons licensed folk, pop, and rock songs. He's a singer and guitarist from Ohio.