The best legal places to get free music downloads
If you're a YouTuber, Music Composer, or a Video Editor, you must have come across a time when you needed some legal and licensed music for your work. In this post, I have listed and also reviewed some of the best legal places to get free music downloads. At these sites, you don't just get instrumental music, beats, or background audio, there's a lot for listeners and fans to explore as well.
You can find some mainstream and micro influencer artists, their profiles & full albums, event dates, and of course, free music to download in various audio formats of MP3, FLAC, WAV, or OGG.
Some of these websites also have iOS and Android apps to download free music on the go. However, you may not find raw MP3 files to download in some apps and may get offline downloads in a few.
The audio, beats, instrumental music, or songs that you find on these websites are entirely legal to download since they are uploaded by the artists themselves.
However, whether you can perform any derivative works on the music, purely depends upon the license.
If it's a CC-BY license, you need not worry about anything as long as you credit the artist. However, you must check how you're using the work under CC-BY-NC-ND license because it doesn't allow any remixing or tweaking of the artwork.
Rest assured, you need not worry about the legality of music. Some of the below websites are nonprofits and have teams of 100+ people. They are also getting a lot of support from donators and contributors.
Whereas some websites are handcrafted by people and startups in the music industry, run by Founders and Investors that are trying to bring transparency to the music industry, working on connecting the fans with artists better, and bringing more and more of new music and talent on the plate.
Let us now look into some of the best legal places to get free music downloads:
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Free Music Archive
The songs you find on FMA are handpicked by some of the most notable and trusted Curators in the industry such as KEXP FM, Music for Video, etc. and is run by America's famous FM - WFMU.
You will find audio files that belong to the public domain or under Creative Commons Licenses.
They have a library of 100,000 free music downloads available on the site. Some of the popular artists you can find on the portal are Kevin Macleod, Nine Inch Nails, etc.
When it comes to quality, you get the music downloads in MP3 format at a 320-kbps bitrate which is great.
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Internet Archive is another nonprofit portal to get music downloads for free. You can find many things on the portal such as audiobooks, podcasts, recordings, and of course, songs provided by the artists in over 400 languages!
When it comes to songs, you will see that they have both mainstream content such as full albums of Lil Wayne, Michael Jackson, etc. as well as the non-mainstream content of beats, instrumental music, available in genres of Rock, Pop, Old Classic, Hip-Hop, R&B, etc.
You'll go crazy when you see the number of audio archives they have on the portal; it is over 3 Million!
- Jamendo is among the best free music download websites where artists of all genres share their songs for free.
This is done after getting a Creative Commons (CC) License which allows artists or authors to share their work with users for both commercial or non-commercial purposes depending upon the owner's choice.
In short, you get free mp3 songs to download at Jamendo, from the artists themselves!
Not just that, you can follow various artists, create playlists, stream music on the site at 96-kbps bitrate, all for free!
They even have Android and iOS applications and boast of a massive collection of over 500,000 songs by 40,000 artists!
PureVolume is a free mp3 music download website where artists, fans, and listeners can create accounts and connect with each other. You can sort the music among various options of Featured, Top Downloads or browse the profiles of music composers and bands.
It is proud of their wide recognition from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other prominent portals.
Over 2 million artists are providing free music downloads in genres of Acoustic, Alternative Blues, Christian, country, Metal, Indie, etc. You will find many good bands and artists as well such as Three Days Grace, Michael Jackson, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Good Charlotte, etc.
- Amazon
Amazon has a great library of songs, with Amazon Music Unlimited, they have already become the competitors of Apple Music and Spotify. However, you can only access and download the songs once you sign in and provide your card details.
It works differently than the rest of the music portals. You can only buy songs from amazon.com. Hence, to download music for free, you are supposed to buy or download songs from Amazon for zero dollars. That way, you will be making a purchase, but there will be no deduction from your bank account.
After you make the purchase, you will get a link to download the song.
However, the number of songs available for free or $0 are only a couple of hundreds. You will be able to find songs by Foo Fighters, Clayton Brothers, and many other artists.
- NoiseTrade is another website that provides free music downloads in exchange for your email ID and zip code. This helps the artists better connect with fans when they release a new album or plan out a concert in an area.
This is precisely why it's called a direct-to-fan portal.
NoiseTrade initially offered Christian Music to download for free when they started in 2009. However, the numbers speak a different story now. They boast of a user-base of 1.3 million with over 20,000 artists in genres of Alternative, Blues, Classical, Rock, Pop, etc.
However, NoiseTrade is probably the worst when it comes to the quality of Music. It's only a 64-kbps bitrate quality that's much worse than the radio quality (128-kbps) or CD Quality (160-kbps).
But, no complaints though, when you get raw music files to download without spending a dime!
- SoundClick
If you're a music composer or rapper looking for some good quality (320-kbps) hip-hop beats, SoundClick is the perfect portal to go to.
However, you will only find a few artists that provide free music. Many artists offer a lease/license for the songs, and the price varies with what you want to do with the songs.
They have a library of over 5 million songs and hundreds and thousands of artists. Some of the popular artists for beats on the portal are Tony Fadd, Vybe Beatz, etc.
That's not it; you can even access SoundClick from its Android and iOS applications.
Go to the link to find a list of 17 places to download music.
