The following sites provide access to free, legal streaming and/or music downloads
Jamendo
Last.fm
Magnatune
Shoutcast
Spinner
we7
If you have a site which provides free and legal music to internet users, please feel free to contact us to be added to this page.
Grooveshark.com is a decent free and legal service. Also Spotify. But these sorts of sites are legal because they pay money to the record companies to play the music, and then make it back in ads and ad space sales. So they aren’t much good as boycotting sites!
BPI has contacted us to inform us that Grooveshark’s “legal” standing is questionable, hence it’s exclusion from our list.
Huh. Good to know.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Either the sites which have mainstream music are going to be paying cash to the BPI or the BPI are going to claim they’re illegal.
Problem is Grooveshark has very little to explain how it operates. From what I can gather the issue is that many users are uploading copyrighted material to their Grooveshark accounts which they do not have the authority to do. This ends up getting played/streamed by listeners ‘illegally’, hence the BPI’s annoyance.
From @adamliversage communications head of the BPI:
I will attempt to contact Grooveshark to get their take, or if they want to contact us to set the record straight that would be equally as great.
I think he was more interested in the purpose of this page, since visiting some of these sites breaks the boycott. Any of the ones which are ad-supported will be paying BPI labels for their music… somewhat less, but still paying. And your clicks make their ad spaces look good.
Jamendo is legit and kinda awesome, because it is indie artists who release songs under Creative Commons licenses. I am still trying to figure out the others, but if it’s got tracks on it that belong to the BPI record labels, and the BPI considers it legal, it’s because they are receiving money.
I admit I’m still investigating some of them, for example last.fm & more than welcome others to point me towards other sites I have missed which offer boycott-safe services or ones I have mistakenly put on the list.
Amazing Radio (http://amazingradio.co.uk/) should be on this list. They play unsigned artists only, so it’s definitely boycott-friendly, and everything I’ve heard on there has been really good.