Free music to download

Posted to Arts and Entertainment by David Teeghman at 4:09 p.m., Oct. 12, 2009

The internet is a vast wasteland of free content that is mostly useless, this very blog being a perfect example (ha, self-deprecation!).

Text has long dominated the cyberspace, but audio is more important to today's web user than ever before. Your options to listen to music online are endless, from Playlist to Last.fm to Pandora. But these sites only allow you to stream music while you're at a computer. What about sites to download music from for FREE?

Such a place exists, miraculously, and it is UrbanOutfitters.com

Yes, Urban Outfitters, the clothing store catering to the ultra cool hip young sexy urban crowd lets you download the most hip young cutting-edge indie music out there.

Playlists made up of 25 songs each are advertised prominently on the home page, and new ones are published every other month. The playlist currently advertised for download (LSTN #7 at the moment) is the same one being used in Urban Outfitter stores around the country to add to the Urban Outfitters ambiance. This is the very same ambiance that convinces you that it is entirely acceptable to pay $60 for ironically gawdy watches.

The playlists, while awesome, are not without their catches. You will never find any Billboard Hot 100 songs on this list. Less Miley and Jay-Z and more Apache Beat and Princeton. It's okay, I've never heard of these hip indie bands either.

But the greatest hindrance to these playlists might be the playlist's expiration date. When you click the "CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD" button, 25 songs download automatically to your iTunes. But each playlist has an expiration date, at which time those songs will unceremoniously disappear from your iTunes. But you have six months before that happens, so you have plenty of time to give each playlist a thorough run-through.

Do you know of any other random places to get free music online? Let us know in the comments section.