Thing 48 - Is there any free AND legal music out there?

music.download.com

As a library employee who works in the computer lab, I am often assisting patrons who want me to help them burn a CD or put songs on their mp3 player, but they have brought in no music. They are often infrequent computer users and think that there is all this free music out there to download from the internet. Here is the only site I found that has fairly easy to find, legal and free song downloads. Below I have listed the steps to get songs they might want to listen to (more popular/top 40 stuff.) If a patron wants free and legal MP3s to download and burn onto a CD or add to their mp3 players, this is an option. This only works if they don’t have a certain artist/song that they want.

1. Go to http: music.download.com
2. Click on the yellow “110,462” in the green bar. It reads “110,462 Free MP3s” (The number might have changed if new songs were added or removed.)
   
3. Sort by “total listens” to get more popular artists listed first.
4. Click on the blue “see all free tracks” line.
5. If a song is available to download you will see“Download Free MP3” next to the song title. Not all songs will have this option.
   
6. Click on "Download Free MP3" download the song.

Discovery exercise:
1. Follow the steps above.
2. Download the song of your chosing and save it to your desktop or mp3 player.
3. Write a blog post about this website. Did you find it easy to use? Do you think it would be easy for patrons to use? Do you know of any other websites that might be useful for this purpose?