MUSIC SITE GUIDE
The Music Site
Guide is Fingertips' main listing of web sites I have found that offer free and legal songs to download. 
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introduction
The Music Site Guide is best for those of you who want to do some web music
exploration on your own, but want at least to be pointed in the right direction.
The sites listed here will be the best sites I have found to date with a notable
selection of free and legal MP3s to listen to and download.
The Music Site Guide is not merely a list of links; each site listed will be accompanied by a short overview of what the site looks and feels like, and what it has to offer. The web already has far too many lists of links, far too few informed, annotated guides.
As with the Select Artist Guide, the Music Site Guide will never be comprehensive--the web is
too big and ever-changing for that.
The sites mentioned in the Music Site Guide are divided into four basic categories:
MP3 Hubs, MP3 Boutiques, Record Company Sites, and MP3 Blogs.
MP3 Hubs are sites that gather a large number of MP3s together from a variety of rock-related genres. While the internet is laced with MP3 Hubs featuring either illegally distributed songs or legally distibuted songs that cost money, Fingertips, needless to say, will only list MP3 Hubs offering MP3s that are both legal and free.
To be included in the Music Site Guide, an MP3 Hub must be more than just an upload free-for-all--which is what I call a site that seeks to collect songs from anyone and everyone with a song to sing and a computer to capture it on. Fingertips has little (if any) patience for upload free-for-alls.
Instead, I wholeheartedly support edited MP3 Hubs--sites at which MP3s are selected for inclusion by some criterion or another. The best of these (such as Insound ) are sites that are obviously operated by people who care about quality music--sites that post and/or link to MP3s that are thought to be songs of merit. You or I may of course disagree with their taste, but at least there is someone's taste behind this.
MP3 Boutiques are smaller and/or less
well-organized places to find MP3s. Like MP3 Hubs, MP3 Boutiques sometimes host MP3s and sometimes point to MP3s hosted elsewhere. Typically I'll consider it a Hub if a site is both reasonably large and if it displays an effort to offer some structure within which the MP3s are placed and some capacity for the user to search for what he or she may be looking for. Boutiques on the other hand tend simply to list songs and you just have to go through the list to see what they have. Most (but not all) are relatively small.
MP3 Boutiques are sometimes sponsored by a previously existing organization of some sort--perhaps a magazine (e.g. Filter Magazine) or, even, a clothing store (Abercrombie & Fitch actually had one for a while). In these cases the music presented on these sites is often there for promotional reasons rather than for strictly musical reasons. Even so, the quality can be quite good, so don't overlook the Boutiques in your MP3 hunt.
As with the Hub listings (and by now it kind of goes without saying around here), Fingertips will only list MP3 Boutiques that offer free and legal downloads.
There are of course many more sites that might be considered MP3 Boutiques than are listed in the Music Site Guide. If you're really into these sorts of sites, you can find a whole other page of further listings on the Secondary MP3 Resources Page. If you have a lot of time on your hands.
Record Company Sites are web sites run by record labels that feature a
good selection of MP3s by their affiliated artists. Labels that do this well tend
to be smallish labels rather than the big boys. Sometimes, such labels feature
a small handful of artists with some name recognition, other times, the line-ups
are pretty darned unfamiliar. Rest assured there are plenty more record company
sites with MP3s than I am listing here; the ones I list are the ones I have
found so far with actual good music to offer, at least some of the time.
To avoid overcrowding, I have split off many smaller record companies onto
their own page, which you can access by clicking a note at the bottom of the
record company list on the Music Site Guide page (or by clicking
here, if you're immediately curious.)
An MP3 Blog is a personal web site that offers daily or near-daily lists of MP3s that the site's author likes, sometimes with a bit of commentary, sometimes without. Often these blogs themselves host the songs. Some of these sites feature a fair amount of music I like and are pretty well written, and the best of them offer songs in good faith--to be listened to, not burned or distributed.
But with a couple of notable exceptions, MP3 blogs tend not to care whether songs are legally or illegally uploaded. And the fact remains that however much in good faith some of these bloggers post their songs, once uploaded, a song becomes part of the internet and all too easily distributed illegally. I don't like this idea too much, so I'm going to steer clear from recommending all that many MP3 blogs, as a rule.
That said, there are a few stalwart bloggers who stick to the free and legal side of things, and those I find whose taste in music I admire and whose writing style I find engaging will be listed in the Music Site Guide.
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If you have suggestions for sites to add to the list can be sent to Fingertips,
click here. I will respond
to all email, but alas can make no guarantee about incorporating all suggestions into
the Music Site Guide.
updated 18 Dec 07
© copyright 2003-2007 Fingertip Productions