There are plenty of websites out there that offer free music downloads, and we've weeded through them so you can find only the best and brightest in this list of the best 15 places to get free music downloads legally.
At these websites, you'll be able to download free music in high-quality MP3 format so they'll play on your computer, phone, or tablet. Since you can download and save them, they'll forever be yours.
All the free music downloads here are legal. They're either public domain or, in most cases, the artists have given permission for you to download and enjoy their hard work. That means you can feel great about listening to the music and discovering some hidden gems you might have otherwise passed up.
What We Like
Lots of ways to browse for music downloads
Lets you stream music, too
Includes an online radio function
There are mobile apps you can use
What We Don't Like
Downloads are in MP3 only; no option for other formats
Requires you to make a user account (it's free) to download the music
Free downloads are in MP3 quality only, not HD
All the free music downloads at Jamendo are made available through Creative Commons licensing meaning that the artists themselves have decided they want to give out their music for free for the masses to enjoy.
You can discover new music at Jamendo by viewing the most popular music and the songs that trending. There's also a Latest music filter to see recently added songs. You can also search for artists that you know to see if their music is available for download.
Another way to find great music here is by listening to one of the Jamendo radio channels. When you find a song or artist you like, you can then download that single track or the entire album.
Yet another way to browse this free music is via playlists, like "Best of January," "Electro Funk Frenzy," "Valentine's Day," and "Girls On the Rise."
If you'd rather stream the music at Jamendo instead of download it, they give you that option, too.
What We Like
You get the whole album at once in one click
Lets you preview the tracks before downloading them
Provides a way to tip the artists
Also includes eBooks and audiobooks
What We Don't Like
Must download the whole album; can't pick specific tracks
You have to enter your email address to download the music
You can download thousands of free music albums from NoiseTrade, through Paste Magazine, and they're all completely legal to take. The artists want you to check out their creations and if you like it and are inclined to do so, you can tip them or help promote them to your friends.
You can stream part of the songs right now, but to download an album and access the full-length music, you need to enter your email address and zip code. You'll receive the album as a ZIP file which contains the MP3 files.
You can easily find new albums you want to download by viewing the "Notable" picks on the home page, plus there's a list of genres you can comb through.
NoiseTrade also offers free eBook and audiobook downloads for authors who'd like to share and earn your tip.
Amazon
What We Like
You can sort the list of music downloads
Provides several ways to filter and refine the list of downloads
The songs can be previewed
What We Don't Like
The download process can be confusing
You have to log in to your Amazon account to download the music
Only the music through the link below is free; other music on Amazon is not
There are thousands and thousands of free music downloads at Amazon.com, making it one of my favorite websites to visit when I'm looking for new music to download legally.
You can see the all the free music downloads by choosing a genre or sorting by popularity, release date, length of the song, reviews, or in alphabetical order by title, artist, or album.
You can play the songs before downloading them, but when you're ready to save the songs to your computer, add the item to your cart. Then, you can check out as if you were purchasing something by pressing Confirm Purchase. You'll be taken to a link to download the free music, and it'll also be saved in the Digital Orders tab of your order history.
What We Like
Lets you download songs and full albums
Includes lots of tracks you won't find on other free music download sites
You can choose to pay if you want to
No user account is needed
What We Don't Like
Not every song you see is free to download
You have to explicitly say that you're choosing to not pay for the music
There isn't a "free only" page
Bandcamp makes it easy for artists to share their music in a "name your price" type of setting. This means that while you can pay for the music, another option is to put a zero in the payment box and download the song for free.
The Discover page is a great way to find the best selling music at Bandcamp, plus new arrivals and songs recommended by artists.
Not all songs can be downloaded for free but for the ones that don't have a minimum price, put a zero in the "Name Your Price" box. To do this, choose Buy Digital Track, enter 0 in the box, select download to your computer, and follow the on-screen prompts to get the download.
Sometimes, there also isn't a minimum price on entire albums, so you can use the Buy Digital Album option to get all of its songs for free.
What We Like
Lots of free audio downloads to pick from
Several sorting and filtering options
Most music can be downloaded in several audio formats
Supports previewing music
You don't need a user account to download the free music
What We Don't Like
Has a lot more lower quality music than other music download sites
Navigating the website can be confusing
Internet Archive's Audio Archive has millions of results for free downloads of music, audio, podcasts, radio programs, and most notably their Live Music Archive.
You can sort the free music downloads by most viewed items, title, date published, or creator, as well as filter the results by media type (concerts, audio, etc.), topics & subjects (e.g. rock or funk), language, and more.
You'll find all kinds of artists with free music downloads here including Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Grateful Dead, 311, and Smashing Pumpkins.
There are usually multiple file formats that you can download the free music in, like MP3 and OGG. These are listed in the DOWNLOAD OPTIONS area of every download page.
What We Like
Includes music from signed and unsigned artists
Lots of genres to pick from
No sign in necessary
Includes lots of music download deals and discounts
What We Don't Like
Not every song is free
There isn't a single page where you can find all the free music; it's mixed in with music that costs
Some songs can only be streamed
SoundClick is the ultimate portal into finding free music downloads directly from the artists websites. These artists have decided they'd like to let people download their music for free. This includes signed and unsigned musicians.
With SoundClick, you can browse through the music charts and genres until you find a free music download you'd like to have and then either listen to or download that song.
You can also create custom radio stations, get to know other listeners on the forums, and read more about your favorite SoundClick artists.
While you can, of course, download free music from SoundClick, some artists make their music available only after you've paid for the download, and others allow music streaming only.
What We Like
Every download is available in one click
A user account is not required
There are lots of ways to browse for music
What We Don't Like
It's hard to search for free music only
You can't preview songs before downloading them
MP3 is the only download option
Last.fm has several pages of free music downloads that fall into all genres. You can browse these free downloads by category, new releases, coming soon, or by simply looking through the whole list.
Just one selection will download your chosen song.
Besides free music downloads, you can also stream thousands of songs and get recommendations of bands you'll love.
What We Like
Tons of content
Includes music downloads from well-known and new, up-and-coming artists
Every track can be streamed before downloading
Easier to find free downloads vs some other music download sites
What We Don't Like
You have to log in to download music
Finding free downloads can be difficult
SoundCloud is a website that lets you stream and download free music. Content at SoundCloud is sometimes uploaded by professional artists, while others are shared by independent musicians.
Not all music on SoundCloud can be downloaded, and some require you to Like a Facebook page to get the file. However, music that can be downloaded instantly and without an account, either have a Download file button in the More menu or a FREE DOWNLOAD button under the song.
What We Like
All songs are streamable
Easy to find popular song downloads
Many ways to sort, filter, and browse for free music
No need to make a user account
Mobile apps for streaming music
What We Don't Like
Not every song can be downloaded
No way to find just the free music downloads
You'll like Audiomack if you like SoundCloud and are interested in finding new music. All the music on this website is 100 percent legal and free to stream, and depending on the artist, you'll find music downloads, too.
The Audiomack website is very easy to use. You can search for songs, albums, and artists or browse the Trending or Top Songs sections. There's also a Recently Added page to find all the newest music at Audiomack.
Some of the music genres on this website include reggae, pop, R&B, hip-hop, instrumental, and afrobeats.
You can download music at Audiomack without needing a user account. Most if not all of the songs are in the MP3 format.
If you prefer to stream music from your phone or tablet, Audiomack works that way, too, on both Android and iOS devices.
What We Like
Stream and download.
No user account necessary for albums.
Download in bulk or individually.
No website ads.
What We Don't Like
User account is required for single-track downloads.
Some tracks can only be streamed.
Spinrilla has free hip-hop mixtape downloads. You can browse for these music downloads by the mixtape name, single, or chart, such as the most popular mixtapes today, this month, or all time.
The website navigation is clean and easy to understand, and you only need a user account if you want to download individual songs. Whole albums can be downloaded in seconds without an account.
This website also lets you see which mixtapes will be released in the future. The Upcoming Mixtapes page shows when each mixtape will be available.
These music downloads are accessible from the website but you can also listen on your Android or iOS device via the Spinrilla mobile app.
What We Like
Completely free music downloads you can use for anything
Includes sheet music downloads
Lots of unique ways to find free music
Supports previewing the music
Includes an online radio option
What We Don't Like
Music downloads require you to log in to a user account
Per-day download limits
No free HD audio
Musopen has sheet music and recordings that are completely free, legal, and copyright-free. You can listen online or download the music for whatever purpose. There's even an online radio you can listen to from a computer or through their Classical Radio mobile app.
There are lots of ways to find free music downloads at Musopen: browse by composer, performer, instrument, form, or time period. Of course, you can also do a manual search to see if they have something specific.
Another way to find music downloads here is to use the Music Discovery Tool. With this tool, you can filter all the music on the website by instrument, rating, and license type (to find only public domain music, creative commons music, etc.).
You can preview music without logging in but to actually download anything you find on Musopen, you have to create a user account. A free account gives you access to five music downloads every day and standard, lossy audio quality.
What We Like
Helps you find up-and-coming artists
All the music can be streamed
Lets you browse for downloads by genre
What We Don't Like
Not every song is free to download
You need a user account to download some music
ReverbNation is a good pick if you're looking for music downloads from artists you don't yet know about. Several now-popular bands like Imagine Dragons and The Civil Wars started out on ReverbNation.
Not every song you see on this website can be downloaded, but it is all streamable through your web browser. Downloadable songs are indicated by a small download button next to the song.
The Discover page is a good start if you're not sure where to begin looking for new music downloads at ReverbNation. To search by genre, use the Charts page.
What We Like
Includes mixes from popular artists
Lets you download entire albums at once
Mobile apps are available
No user account is necessary
What We Don't Like
Limited mainly to rap music
Music can be downloaded as MP3 only
If you're into mixtapes and rap, you'll love DatPiff because that's most of the free music downloads you'll find at this website. You can stream as well as download the music.
What you'll find at DatPiff are not only mixtapes made by fans but also releases from artists looking for recognition by giving out their music for free.
One easy way to find free music downloads at DatPiff is to look through the most listened, most downloaded, highest rated, and hot this week sections. Those can be further broken down into all time, this month, this week, and today to see what's been popular over time.
Some of the most popular mixtape downloads at DatPiff are from artists like Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Big Sean, Meek Mill, and Jadakiss.
DatPiff is available on not only computers but also your mobile device. You can get the DatPiff app for free for iOS, Android, and Windows.
What We Like
No user account is needed to download music
Several ways to sort the music
You can listen before downloading
Categorizes song downloads into several genres
What We Don't Like
MP3 is the only download option
You can also download free music at Free Music Archive, which is directed by the freeform radio station WFMU. The music here is free for you to legally download (even without a user account) and is a mix of public domain and Creative Commons licenses.
The easiest way to find music you'd like to download at Free Music Archive is to browse through the genres of music or watch their blog for collections, artists, or songs they'll highlight. They also have top charts for all time, this week, and this month.
If you create a free account at Free Music Archive you'll be able to make your own collections and interact with other listeners.
What We Like
There's a lot of music available
All the songs can be streamed
Apps let you stream from your mobile device
What We Don't Like
It's really hard to find free music downloads
It's too easy to download copyrighted music accidentally
Yes, YouTube is a huge source for music and most of it is illegal to download due to copyright restrictions.
However, if you filter your search results for Creative Commons videos only, it's completely safe to download music from YouTube. Look for videos that have download links to the audio, but if you're sure it's legal and don't see a download link, you can still get it with a YouTube to MP3 downloader.
You might also filter Duration for Short ((here) to find what are most likely music videos instead of interviews, YouTube movies, etc.
Despite YouTube being the largest video streaming service on the internet, we've placed it at the very bottom of this list because it's not easy to find free music among all the other content.
I
was just a naive 15 year old in the year 1998, and my older cousin
introduced me to the best invention in computers after the Internet, the
MP3. It was an instant love, my goal was
to use all my PC storage (10GBs) and fill it with music. I was ready to
start, I got my first MP3s from my cousin: Nena 99 – Luftballoons,
Depeche Mode - Just can’t get enough , and Boston - More than a feeling
and a few others. An eclectic collection of music I know, but it was
just the beginning.
To play my music I had to install an MP3 player, and I installed Winamp my all time favorite player.
Winamp was so cool, it had the slickest interface and it was the first media player that let you create playlists.
There were 3 ways to get mp3s
back then, ripping your cds to mp3, copying mp3s from your friends, or
downloading them from the Internet. Of course the first option was the
easiest one, I converted all my CD library to mp3s, that’s how I got my
first 1000 songs. But this method was not sustainable, it took a lot of
time to rip the cds, and I didn’t have enough money to keep up with the
latest hits from my favorite artists. So I had to go to my good friend
the Internet to stay on top of the trends. There were few options back
then to get music from the Internet, a couple of sites with files in
their root directory. My weapon of choice, The Music Lover a site that
no longer exist that had the Billboard Top 40 Hits updated every week.
Not the best source for indie music, but it had all the MTV hits. It was
good enough for me. That’s how I added a couple of 1000 new songs to my
music library.
After
some months a friend introduce me to Napster the first peer to peer
file sharing app. Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning revolutionized the world
19 years ago with this service. Although the focus was music it gave
birth to other P2P technologies that are booming today like the
Blockchain and Bitcoin. Napster was amazing, sadly it only lasted for of
couple years due to copyright infrigment. Some other services came up
to the rescue (Limewire, eMule, Gnutella) but none of them were as good
as Napster.
Quote from The Social Network movie.
“Sean Parker: Well, I founded an internet company that let folks download and share music for free. Amelia Ritter: Kind of like Napster? Sean Parker: Exactly like Napster. Amelia Ritter: What do you mean? Sean Parker: I founded Napster. Amelia Ritter: Sean Parker founded Napster.”
About 2 years laterone of the last geniuses in human history, Steve Jobs, made paying for music cool😎
again with the launch of the iTunes store. With iTunes my library kept
growing, it had almost every song in the planet. Every song on iTunes
had the best song compression settings, and was the best app for
organizing music. iTunes quickly became the most popular MP3 player, it
had a clean UI that was simple and elegant, obviously you can’t expect
less from a product from Apple.
I
had everything under control with iTunes, my library of more that 30k
songs was in sync with all my devices, I had playlists for every genre,
audience and mood. I was on top of my game until Spotify came knocking
my door. Spotify was a game changer my library grew 100X, now I could
stream every song in the world and the best part I didn’t run out of
storage.
I
have more than 200 playlists on Spotify. I have the app on my Mac, my
smartphone, my car, my tv and now on my homespeaker. I discover about
100 new songs every week.
Music
is the answer, it has give meaning to my live. Thank you MP3 for
creating this revolution. Can’t wait to see what the future will bring
us.
PS. A few other services that have being part of this history:
Memorializing
the Compact Disc. Once upon a time, the CD was the ubiquitous music
platform. Our story outlines how the disc-based music technology was
adopted, loved and eventually abandoned by a generation that arrived a
little too late to collect vinyl record albums. In its day, the CD
weathered a storm of competitors that sought to usurp the audio throne
by offering key improvements in storage capacity and audio resolution.
But behind the inevitable fall of the CD is a story of how the music
industry refused to read the writing on the wall. All
things considered, I was rather late to the compact disc game. Having
been born to your typical middle-class family in the early 1980s, for
much of my early childhood I made do with cassette tapes of my favorite
acts, from the sweet, poppy sounds of Men Without Hats to a Canadian
band with the (sadly for a pre-pubescent boy) very misleading name,
Barenaked Ladies. Other great groups from the late 1980s and early 90s,
like Guns N Roses, Nirvana, and Soundgarden, also managed to capture my
attention despite some of the frustrating limitations of cassette
technology - like having to fast forward and rewind just so I could
listen to GNR's deliciously guttural rant "Get in the Ring" a few more
times.
Compact Disc Firsts
Optical
digital data-storage was invented by Jim Russel who filed the first
patents in 1966, later purchased by Sony and Philips to develop the CD
Developed in collaboration by Sony and Philips, the Compact Disc launched in 1982
The first CD was officially released on October 1, 1982, it was Billy Joel album 52nd Street.
The
first CD player was the Sony CDP-101, also launched on October 1, 1982.
It retailed for $730, a heavy price for the privilege of listening to
52nd Street by Billy Joel in pristine digital glory.
Soundtrack of Our Lives on CD
Ah,
but that all changed in the winter of 1995, when my parents placed a
Discman under the Christmas tree, along with my first three CDs:
Collective Soul's incredible blue album, Soul Asylum's "Let Your Dim
Light Shine," and Foo Fighters' self-titled debut. For the next few
years, I rarely left the house without that clunky, BK Whopper-sized
device, which I connected to an old stereo when I got home. And, while
my collection of CDs was by no means large, or even particularly
impressive, I rarely went more than a month or so without thinking
about, pining for, and then finally pooling what little grass-cutting
money I had together to buy the next big album. For
the rest of my teenage years, I gravitated towards the kind of music
that had animated my imagination when I first got that Discman, with CDs
from Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, and
the Smashing Pumpkins. Then there were those bands that didn't quite
pack stadiums and weren't everyone's cup of tea but, perhaps for those
very reasons, garnered my love: Better Than Ezra, Toadies, The Verve
Pipe, Spacehog, and Canadian acts like Moist, Limblifter, Econoline
Crush, Finger Eleven, and, of course, my personal favourite, Our Lady
Peace
US CD Sales Since 1982
Oh,
those were the days. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who fondly
remembers the smell -- of some weird, foreign and unhealthy chemicals,
that gently emanated from the freshly opened case of a new compact disc.
It was the good kind of miasma, the type that promised hours of
enjoyment as I played video games, chatted about girls with pals, or
drifted off to sleep. I can even remember how you had to pull a little
harder to get the disc out the first time you used it -- the little
'squelch' sound the plastic made as the disc slid over the case's
donut-hole plug for the first but hardly last time.
Alas, these finer details of CD ownership are now little more than the
footnotes in music history. By the early 2000s, a number of factors
emerged that, within a rather shocking amount of time, signaled the end
of the compact disc. First
and foremost for me, personally, it was remarkably hard to predict
which discs would be winners. Sure, you could listen to the radio --
that's usually where I heard new music for the first time since my
parents didn't have cable television and therefore no access to MTV or
Canada's Much Music -- but for most bands that meant exposure to just
one or two songs. In the end, this made the CD-buying experience a
little like Russian roulette -- a slight overstatement, but less so when
you consider, that through most of the 90s, each CD was about $20 and
my job was cutting neighbors' lawns during the summer.
That
meant I bought many, many duds -- usually, one-hit-wonder CDs where one
fantastic song on the radio gave me hope the entire album would be
amazing. Oh, I still remember the desperate, sinking feeling that washed
over me as I frantically searched an album for a second or third decent
track -- and then failing to land on one. It happened far too often for
me, and as time went on I became less willing to gamble away the little
cash I had. Eventually, even albums with two or three great songs
seemed a waste, which complicated things further, since the early 2000s
brought what I deemed fewer of the rock-solid albums of the 90s --
albums like Offspring's Smash, Green Day's Dookie, or Nirvana's
Nevermind. RIAA Recorded Music Sales
CD sales surpassed cassette tape in 1991, its final year as the top format in music sales was 2015
Music streaming subscription became the top selling music format for the first time ever in 2016
Adjusted for inflation, 2016 vinyl sales hit highest levels since 1989
Digital Downloads Arrive
Right
around the same time, friends and coworkers at the grocery store where I
worked started talking about this new software that allowed you to
download songs or even whole albums without paying anything at all! What
was this fan-dangled technology, I wondered, and how can I get in on
it? Although
Audioholics can't condone unlicensed digital downloads, it's safe to
say it was a significant factor in the decline of the disc because
nearly everyone who listened to music at the dawn of the new millennium
at least experimented with digital downloads. Although I missed the
Napster train, I was most definitely aboard for the Limewire bus. It had
some serious drawbacks - it left all kinds of nasty junk on the family
computer - but all of a sudden I had nearly a world of music at my
fingertips. And so began the age of downloading tracks and burning them
to discs. In its own way, it was thrilling: you could create the
ultimate CD tailored to your own music interests and not those of some
goofball studio exec. My ripped discs would go from Blink 182 to
Deftones to Eiffel 65 and I could often pack more than 20 tracks on a
single CD. And
it was cheap: other than having to buy packs of blank CDs and paying to
get the spyware wiped from my chugging PC, the process was very
affordable. So affordable, in fact, that I no longer felt the need to
protect my CDs as if they were children; instead, they fell down the
side of car seats and slid under my bed, where they sometimes stayed
until scratched beyond use. But no biggie; I could just use the files
I'd already downloaded to create a whole new CD in a few minutes.
Retailers and Car Manufacturers Sense the Stench of Death of the Compact Disc
Fast-forward a decade or so and the CD is finally, finally being phased out
by the few retailers who still offer them. At Best Buy, one of the
handful of companies that's so far (narrowly) survived the digital
revolution, in recent years the compact disc section has shrunk down
further and further, to the point where it's little more than a novelty;
a place where your Dad can grab best-of albums from Led Zeppelin or The
Who. From literally rows and rows of compact discs and several
"listening stations," big retailers like Best Buy have in many cases
shrunk their CD offerings to a small display at the end of a single
aisle. Now,
even that meager offering is about to disappear, with reports
indicating Best Buy will cease selling compact discs this July. Target,
another brick-and-mortar retailer from the CD's heyday, is expected to
follow suit shortly thereafter.
To add a final nail in the CD proverbial coffin, car manufacturers are phasing out CD players
starting in 2018. Instead, you will find at least one USB port, and
Bluetooth capability for streaming music from your phone pretty standard
fare. In
truth, this is long overdue. Even the Napster and Limewire age is a
thing of the past, replaced in large part by streaming services like
Apple Music, Google Play, Spotify, and countless others, which give you
access to a great fount of music for less than what a single CD cost in
the 90s. In fact, that's how I'm listening to 'ol Kurt sing about
teenage angst right now. Nevertheless,
this seems like a good time for a heart-felt send-off to the compact
disc and the many CD collections that are still out there, in basements,
attics, storage lockers, boxes under stairways. Cheers and RIP. Now
that the once dominant audio platform's days are behind us the question
remains: Did you like CDs? Please share your thoughts in the related
forum thread below.
Our journey starts in New York City.
You know the place I’m
talking about. If you’ve watched Seinfeld, it’s the diner Jerry and
friends hole up in almost every episode, but that’s wasn’t why I was
there. This was where Suzanne Vega wrote her song “Tom’s Diner” sometime
in 1981. Now I’m not the biggest Suzanne Vega fan, but there’s a reason
she’s considered the mother of MP3. “Tom’s Diner” was used extensively
in the research that went into the creation of the MP3 format. And this
diner is where it all began.
It’s a good song, but more
importantly, it’s entirely a cappella—and recorded flawlessly.
Audiophiles in the late 80s found that the smooth yet subtle performance
Vega delivered in the original was perfect for tuning their hi-fi
speaker systems. As it turns out, the human voice was a good way to test
for clarity, and playing “Tom’s Diner” reveals minor tuning problems in
a speaker.
But as most great things in life are, Tom’s Diner’s historical
importance happened completely by chance. Karlheinz Brandenburg (the
lead scientist working on the compression algorithm) was finishing up
his post-doctorate working on digital music compression, when he heard
“Tom’s Diner” playing on the radio down the hall. “This. This is the
song that I will listen to countless times on my mission to create the
best audio algorithm the world has ever seen!”, he thought to himself.
And yes, I did make that part up but every hero (or villain) needs that
eureka moment so I took some liberties here. Anyway, back to the story.
Brandenburg
had been studying psychoacoustics, or how people perceive music, and
used the concept of auditory masking as the baseline for what he wanted
his algorithm to do. Without getting too scientific, auditory masking is
when there is a loud sound that drowns out another smaller sound.
For whom the bell tolls
If I strike a bell in a quiet room, and then go outside and strike it again, listen to what happens.
The bell didn’t sound the same just then, did it? It was harder to hear,
lost in the cacophony of the outside world. The ringing was shorter,
wasn’t it? Also, was the bell quieter? It was.
No, the outside
world didn’t make that bell sound any different, but rather, the way MP3
compresses audio did. But even if you tried this for yourself in the
real world, the result would be similar. Our ears and brain didn’t
evolve to hear the difference between two specific tones at 632Hz and
635Hz, they evolved to hear a growl. Or a yell. You know, sounds that
might signal impending doom.
If a louder sound of similar
frequency is present with a quieter one, your brain deletes it. This
physiological response—auditory masking—is the entire basis of the
psychoacoustic algorithm that defines MP3 compression. Any sound your
brain would normally not be able to hear: the encoding deletes to save
space. If it works as intended, you’ll have a much smaller file- and
your ears would be none the wiser. This happens all the time in our
everyday lives. Ever been in a bar that’s too loud to hear what your
friend is saying? Same thing.
The MP3 is why we listen to songs on our phones today.
Brandenburg
used this to his advantage, devising an algorithm that would find the
sound data that humans couldn’t hear because of auditory masking, and
just getting rid of it. He took “Tom’s Diner” and ran it through his
compression algorithm…. and Vega’s vocals in “Tom’s Diner” sounded like a
possessed demon fighting its way through his speakers. Clearly, the
algorithm was doing something funky. So he tweaked it, and ran it again.
And again. And again. Each time changing the algorithm slightly until,
after what I’m sure was a great few months of listening to the same song
constantly, the differences between the original and the end result
were almost imperceptible. MP3 compression was finally ready for the big
time.
When the MP3 was invented, it was still a long way off from
becoming the dominant music format of the new millennium. It had to
overcome technological limitations, a cartel-like recording industry,
and it needed the internet to do it.
While MP3 was a great way to
compress an audio file in 1990, consumer storage just wasn’t up to the
task. While you could theoretically hold 700MB on a CD, hard drives of
the time were typically no bigger than a few tens of megabytes at best.
You couldn’t just copy 700MB of uncompressed WAV audio- there just
wasn’t space. Piracy wasn’t really a viable option.
At the time, if you wanted digital audio, you had to go to record store…
or sign up for one of those insane CD clubs. You couldn’t listen to
songs before buying them without the radio. You couldn’t just go on
YouTube, and you definitely couldn’t torrent anything on a dial-up
modem. The music industry knew it had a monopoly on its market, and from
1995 through 2000, several companies banded together to artificially
inflate the price of CDs by about $5 per album. Consumers knew they were
getting gouged, but there wasn’t a clearly superior alternative until
1999. That year, all hell broke loose, and MP3 began its ascent to
becoming the dominant music format.
Evolution
The world of
1999 was far different than the world of 1990. Hard drive storage had
climbed orders of magnitude greater from 20MB into several Gigabytes of
storage. 56k and cable modems were replacing the 24-baud models of the
past, allowing just enough download speed to snag an MP3 in a few
minutes, and just like that: the landscape was fertile for MP3’s
technological revolution.
That revolution came in the form of
Napster. Founded in the greater Boston area by brothers Shawn and John
Fanning; along with Sean Parker, Napster offered its users a
peer-to-peer networking solution to share their music online. For the
first time ever, your average consumer could go online, search for
anything they wanted, download it, and create a library of digital music
without buying anything. CD-Rs allowed users to create their own CDs as
well. Piracy wasn’t just an expression of rebellion, but a market
response to an overpriced and inflexible commodity.
By
early 2000, Napster had over 20 million users, downloading over a
billion songs. By former employees’ own accounts, their software team
could barely keep up with how fast the traffic expanded, even after
attracting significant resources from venture capital firms to address
the issue.
That was the first sign that file sharing wasn’t just a
flash in the pan. It was here to stay. In fact, the number of P2P file
sharers would continue to expand, with the NPD group estimated 15
million households used P2P networks in 2006, and 18.3% of all computers
worldwide had Limewire (another popular P2P service) installed.
Almost 20 percent of the world's computers had Limewire. That's more than had macOS. Let that sink in.
After
a 31% drop in industry CD sales that year, the Recording Industry
Association of America, or RIAA panicked, and found an opportune
punching bag in online music piracy. Though the MP3’s spread arguably
increased demand for music, they tried to strangle it in the crib by
suing Napster.
The future of the popular file sharing service
became the hot-button issue of 2000, with musicians and record companies
alike taking starkly diverging positions on the issue in a very public
forum. Many people remember the outspoken Lars Ulrich of Metallica fame
leading the RIAA’s crusade against Napster, but fewer people remember
Public Enemy frontman Chuck D’s oddly prescient defense of free music
sharing in a debate between the two musicians hosted by Charlie Rose.
Chuck’s
position was that MP3 sharing was going to change the balance of power
in favor of the content creator, instead of the record label holding all
the power. While Lars claimed that it didn’t matter: MP3 sharing was
(in his words) illegal, Chuck pointed out that most people across the
globe didn’t have a way to “get found” and that distributing music for
free online would increase demand.
History proved Chuck D right,
but unfortunately for Napster, they lost their fight and shut down in
July 2001. But the toothpaste was out of the tube. As soon as one P2P
service was destroyed, another cropped up, and so on and so forth over
the 2000s. When attacking P2P services didn’t stem the tide of MP3
sharing, he RIAA went after thousands of individuals by abusing the
subpoena process, famously attempting to sue twelve-year-old children
and the people who were literally incapable of stealing the music they
were sued over. In most of the 17,587 people sued, the RIAA opted to
take a cash settlement instead of pursuing cases to completion, but the
industry’s image was tarnished forever as a result.
And MP3 sharing persisted.
New horizons
To
meet the new demand for a way to listen to MP3 files, manufacturers
started to release digital music players, capable of storing more music
than the venerable compact disc in a package that was far more
convenient. In 1998, the Recording Industry Association of America
failed to win a judgement against Diamond for their MP3 player, thus
opening the floodgates for more commercially-available portable music
players. Now that there was no legal barrier anymore, any company could
profit off of the explosive spread of the MP3.
The decision was a
rare double-whammy, as it were. On top of creating a legal market for
MP3 players, it also set the precedent for a legal market for MP3
downloads in the following years, which also paved the way for the
long-term success of streaming services. But there is one product that
would help drive the final nail in the CD coffin. In October 2001, Apple
released the iPod.
After
the MP3 was done turning the music industry on its head, the MP3 Player
came along and changed everything we know about smartphones.
Hot
on the heels of MP3’s rapid rise, many companies tried to create a
pocketable MP3 player with mass appeal. Forget about sex appeal. SaeHan
Information Systems released the first commercial personal music player
in 1998: the MPMan F10, not to be confused with Diamond Multimedia’s Rio
PMP300, which was released eight months later.
To no one’s
surprise, rival companies tried to ride on the Rio’s coattails, but hard
drive players were still cumbersome and a chore to navigate. Things
were slow. You could cook a frozen pizza, eat it, and return to your
computer only to see that it was on the brink of overloading from
transferring a few CD’s-worth of songs. As you may expect, this created a
demand for a more efficient, portable, and intuitive music experience.
It wasn’t until the iPod that gold was struck.
The rise of the iPod
Prior
to October 2001, we recognized Apple for their computers and as that
thing that magically keeps the doctor away. But Apple hit the ground
running by announcing the iPod. Its debut form looks embarrassingly
archaic from a 2018 perspective. However, at the time it was a
breakthrough for portable music and carefully negotiated consumer
demands for an all-in-one media player with an unheard of storage
capacity of 5GB. Not only that, but the 1st gen iPod provided 20 minutes
of shock protection. It’s comical now, but users could exercise freely
without worrying about damaging the hard drive. Sure, it wasn’t the
first compact MP3 player to reside in the pockets of children and
women’s jeans alike, but it was the one that consumers unanimously
drooled over.
With the slogan, “1,000 songs in your pocket” and a
well-timed release for the holiday season, the first iteration was a
success, selling 125,000 units [3, 14]. Its spring 2002 update sealed
the deal with Windows compatibility; users could easily operate within a
well-oiled ecosystem unlike ever before. This provided a way to
completely customize what music consumers bought, kept, and listened to
without needing to carry a library of discs. Two years later, the 4th
generation iPod received photo capabilities, foreshadowing the market
for a multifunctional device.
A music player that takes photographs? What could possibly come next?
As
our voracious appetite for convenient media consumption grew, Apple and
others continued to innovate, keeping up with the exponential curve of
demand. Video playback and basic gaming functionality were integrated.
Meanwhile, single devices were granted increasing functionality while
becoming evermore portable. Of course, competitors garnered followers
for their portable media players too, such as the Sansa Clip, which had
dirt-cheap affordability on its side. But their efforts couldn’t keep
pace with Apple’s iPod hierarchy.
Following the iPod Classic’s
success, the iPod Mini had large shoes to fill. As we know, size six
feet will never fill a size 10 shoe. Thus, Apple quickly rebranded the
Mini in favor the Nano in 2005, which celebrated eight generations of
success. This year also included the Shuffle, the “first iPod under
$100” A summer later, Apple made a successful push to attract athletes
with the Nike + iPod partnership. While Apple continued to roll out
improved iPod iterations, they were also working on what was
intellectually conceived in as “Project Purple” and “N45,” known to us
lay-people as the iPhone and iPod Touch, respectively.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
Though
we may never know if the chicken or the egg came first, we do know that
the iPhone preceded the iPod Touch. The latter of which was a sleeker,
thinner, sexier iPhone… without the phone, that is. Released in 2007,
the Touch made for a costly holiday gift that year and for years to
come. It served as a middle ground for parents uncomfortable with
allowing their children unrestricted access to something like the LG enV
Announced
months earlier at MWC 2007, the iPhone made the buzz word. Passionate
fanboys lead news outlets to refer to it as the “Jesus phone,” due to
its cult-like following. The MP3 was now truly ubiquitous. We began to
experience a decline in portable media player sales. Since having a
separate device was too inconvenient for most people stopped using
physical media in favor of their Swiss Army Knife of a smartphone.
Our
phones shifted from a practical object to the extension of the self
that we know today. Wherever we went and wherever we go, our music
library follows. The iPhone release set the precedent for the next
decade of smartphones. It allowed us to not only consolidate our devices
but also to consolidate the control of our lives into a single
apparatus. And to think, one of the first dominoes to fall was about a
little diner on the corner of Broadway and 112th street.
The MP3 holds a place in our collective imagination as the de facto medium for music listening on our computers and smartphones. Like Kleenex with tissues, the term MP3 is eponymous with digital music files. This is thanks in large part to the havoc that the MP3 wreaked on the music industry starting two decades ago.
The dust has settled and listening to music digitally is now the norm, with artists, labels, and listeners largely seeming to have accept streaming as the new industry model. It’s easy to take for granted what exactly we are listening to when we stream something on our laptops and on our phones. Chances are what you’re hearing isn’t even an MP3.
Weirdly enough, the MP3 is a proprietary encoding protocol protected by copyright. As such, Spotify by and large favors the open–source compression codec Ogg Vorbis. Apple has favored AAC since the original launch of iTunes. YouTube’s audio is compressed in AAC too.
What exactly is a codec and why are there so many of them? Codec is an abbreviation of coder–decoder. In the context of audio, it’s the procedure that turns audio into a digital file and back again.
MP3 is a standard for audio compression that shrinks the size of a music file without, ideally, any perceptible loss in sound quality. Think back to how little space computers must’ve had back in the late ‘80s, when development on the MP3 first began.
If the 300–plus GB hard drive on your computer is just about full now, you can imagine how crucial it must have been to compress digital audio files for easy storage and transfer back then.
One second of stereo music on a CD takes up about 1.4 megabits. MP3 encoding yields a file that’s 12 times smaller. Birth of the MP3
Moving Picture Experts Group
In 1988, The Moving Picture Experts Group convened to develop standards for audio and video compression, including a way to get video onto CDs. MP3 would be one of the results of the committee’s work.
The MP3 protocol compresses audio using the principles of psychoacoustics, which is the science of sound perception. This sounds lofty but what it means is that MP3 encoding uses the quirks of human hearing to lop off or heavily approximate audio information we can’t really register anyway.
The idea for using psychoacoustics to guide digital audio compression had been kicked around for awhile, dating back to the late ‘70s. In fact back in the 1910s, studies sponsored by AT&T on human hearing and perception were used to figure out how to compress the signal of phone calls to increase phone line capacities.
Karlheinz Brandenburg, a professor at the Fraunhofer Institute who was one of the lead developers of the MP3 and a principal advocate for using psychoacoustics, thought that the group had locked down the algorithm for the MP3 by 1988.
But the human voice would act as a sticking point.
Brandenburg first tested the MP3 on Suzanne Vega’s acapella for “Tom’s Diner,” used by many audiophiles to test sound systems thanks to the warm recording of Vega’s voice. MP3 compression mangled that recording, leading to Brandenburg and AT&T researchers listening to the track something like 1,000 times to get the compression right.
By 1992, the MP3 was functioning. In hindsight, it’s clear the video CD format was never going anywhere. A few years later, however, the group that developed the MP3 earmarked the relatively new–fangled internet as the ideal forum for the use of the MP3.
If this seems like an excellent bit of foresight, you’d be half–right. Most likely, nobody guessed what communities of internet denizens with ample time on their hands and technical knowhow were capable of.
The MP3 was and still is a proprietary format. The initial business model anticipated for the MP3 worked like this: encoding tools for turning an audio file into MP3 would require expensive licensing fees and would be used by large companies.
Decoding tools, which would turn MP3 back into audio you could listen to, would be widely available and cheap. This isn’t the case any more, obviously. The MP3 unleashed a torrent of easily pirated music. The same force that would spearhead the rise of Napster and file sharing would also undo the MP3’s own business model. Hackers Find the MP3
By the mid ‘90s, the Warez Scene – an online community of computer wizards who took pleasure in cracking and distributing copyrighted material – was already mature and thriving. It only took until 1997 before the ability to encode MP3 was freed from its expensive software license.
In what amounts to the kind of rapid–fire, intercontinental travelogue only the internet could foster, an Australian student bought encoding software from Germany with a stolen credit card from Taiwan. He then cracked the software, uploaded it to a server in Sweden and began distributing it to U.S. universities via an FTP site.
That FTP contained a read–me referring to the program as freeware “thanks to Fraunhofer,” referring to the Fraunhofer Institute where the protocol was developed.
One of the first MP3 piracy groups, Compress ‘Da Audio distributed their first pirated MP3 that summer via IRC, a chat room system. The track was “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica.
There was a dogged determination among these pirating crews. They built elaborate networks and competed with each other to leak big albums, which were then uploaded to topsites — high-speed secret servers — that other members of the Warez Scene could access.
With a few exceptions, this community wasn't interested in profiting from the file sharing. As described in a fascinating New Yorker article about this wave of piracy, members of the Warez Scene often drew moral distinctions between sharing files on topsites and selling bootlegged copies.
It was a culture that sustained itself on friendly competition and the thrill of leaking.
TLC - Fan Mail
Crews like Rabid Neurosis, or RNS, became especially notorious for their ability to leak marquee records from artist like Eminem and TLC weeks before their release.
Brandenburg and the Fraunhofer Institute tried to do damage control, but Pandora’s box had been opened wide. They lowered the cost of encoders, and soon services were popping up allowing users to rip MP3s off their CDs, but this did nothing to tide the flood.
The stage was set for distributing MP3s freely throughout the web, in the process making MP3 the most widely available and used format for music. By 1997, Brandenburg notes, “I got the impression that the avalanche was rolling and no one could stop it anymore.” The Digital Plague Spreads
While the stage was being set for the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the record industry was in the midst of some of its loftiest sales ever years. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, blockbuster releases sold in the neighborhood of 10 million copies. By the end of the ‘90s, Garth Brooks had enjoyed five separate albums going diamond.
Between 1995 and 2004, there is a nearly unbroken stretch of the year’s top selling records moving more than 5 million copies. The seven top–selling records of 2000 can claim this distinction, too. Unless you’re Adele, these kind of sales are just not replicable these days."
Unless you’re Adele, whose last album 25 beat the long–standing record for strongest first week sales held by NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, these kind of sales are just not replicable these days.
The turn–of–the–millennium boom years for the record industry were accompanied by mergers and acquisitions among the major labels. This meant that CD printing was consolidated, with fewer physical plants producing them.
Ironically, that consolidating move made leaks ever more common. Fewer facilities meant that the file sharing community needed fewer contacts in order to secure their leaks
The network of IRC and topsites used by the Warez Scene were ultimately inefficient, inaccessible, and for legal reasons, carefully guarded. This kept leaked releases relatively contained.
Napster would light the match that set fire to fuel spilled by the MP3 and networks of dedicated leakers.
Napster was invented in 1999 by an 18–year old college dropout and Warez enthusiast named Shawn Fanning. With Napster, Fanning pioneered the peer–to–peer file–sharing platform, allowing users to exchange files directly with each other. At its peak, Napster had 80 million registered users.
Napster's barebones approach to filesharing
We’re all familiar what follows. There were the subsequent lawsuits spearheaded by devastatingly rich rock stars like Lars Ulrich, major label hand–wringing, and heavy–handed litigation by the RIAA.
We have the benefit of hindsight for criticizing the industry’s supposed shortsightedness. But it’s illuminating regardless to revisit the way the MP3 revolution was spoken about in 2000, at once a banner year for the music industry as well as the year of Napster. The Already-Shifting Music Industry
Research groups were already anticipating the death of record stores and the coming ability for listeners around the world to tap into what Charles C. Mann, in an article for The Atlantic, was already describing as “a vast cloud of music” via the internet.
Even industry leaders like Edgar Bronfman Jr., then head of Universal, was anticipating the rise of what some starry–eyed commenters called the heavenly jukebox.
“Soon,” he declared in a speech that May, “a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced, and every piece of music ever recorded.”
How this would happen in a way that preserved the economic interests of media companies in general and record labels in particular was still unclear.
A Berkeley economist had the somewhat prescient vision of corporate patronage which sidestepped the traditional industry entirely. Why can’t Coca-Cola, which then had higher annual revenues than the entire music industry, market music as an advertising campaign?
Instead, the industry opted for draconian legal responses and numerous failed attempts to shift towards secured, copy–protected music. These approaches proved ineffective.
Brandenburg, for his part, insisted that any secured format for distributing music on the internet would have would not be compatible with all of the platforms and audio players hitting the market. Ultimately, it’s the industry’s stunning lack of vision on this front that made the rise of the MP3 so devastating."
But the MP3 solved that problem too well. It was compact, of adequately high sound quality, accessible across platforms, and incredibly easy to reproduce and share.
Ultimately, it’s the industry’s stunning lack of vision on this front that made the rise of the MP3 so devastating.
Again in hindsight, it’s ironic that the new industry standard of streaming (with our Spotifys and YouTubes) was engineered by the same type of plucky tech start–up types who unleashed Napster on the world.
Not that we should get too comfortable with the streaming service landscape we see now. Rdio, Grooveshark, Songza, have all gone to the grave of failed streaming services.
Soundcloud, itself dogged by IP lawsuits, has found itself floundering in its attempts to monetize and compete more directly with Spotify and Apple Music.
Most other services are in bad shape. “Napster” – which is really Rhapsody wearing the necrotized remains of the Napster brand like a Silence of the Lambs-style face mask – has struggled to keep pace with paying subscribers.
Rhapsody's Version Napster
Tidal has been wracked by lawsuits, leadership shuffles, and late payments. Even Spotify, which has the biggest user base, has yet to demonstrate whether the streaming model can sustain itself. Spotify has not turned a profit, while analogues in TV and film, like Netflix, are already profitable.
Competitors like Apple Music or Amazon Music Unlimited or Google Play Music are backed with so much capital that they don’t even have to make money to be sustainable—a relationship not unlike that of the Coca-Cola patronage envisioned more than fifteen years ago.
Even if the MP3 is no longer the principle format we use to listen to music digitally, it's not yet clear that the industry has achieved an equilibrium in the face of the precedent it unleashed.
Ah,
but that all changed in the winter of 1995, when my parents placed a
Discman under the Christmas tree, along with my first three CDs:
Collective Soul's incredible blue album, Soul Asylum's "Let Your Dim
Light Shine," and Foo Fighters' self-titled debut. For the next few
years, I rarely left the house without that clunky, BK Whopper-sized
device, which I connected to an old stereo when I got home. And, while
my collection of CDs was by no means large, or even particularly
impressive, I rarely went more than a month or so without thinking
about, pining for, and then finally pooling what little grass-cutting
money I had together to buy the next big album.
Oh,
those were the days. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who fondly
remembers the smell -- of some weird, foreign and unhealthy chemicals,
that gently emanated from the freshly opened case of a new compact disc.
It was the good kind of miasma, the type that promised hours of
enjoyment as I played video games, chatted about girls with pals, or
drifted off to sleep. I can even remember how you had to pull a little
harder to get the disc out the first time you used it -- the little
'squelch' sound the plastic made as the disc slid over the case's
donut-hole plug for the first but hardly last time.
Alas, these finer details of CD ownership are now little more than the
footnotes in music history. By the early 2000s, a number of factors
emerged that, within a rather shocking amount of time, signaled the end
of the compact disc.
Right
around the same time, friends and coworkers at the grocery store where I
worked started talking about this new software that allowed you to
download songs or even whole albums without paying anything at all! What
was this fan-dangled technology, I wondered, and how can I get in on
it?
Fast-forward a decade or so and the CD is finally, finally being phased out
by the few retailers who still offer them. At Best Buy, one of the
handful of companies that's so far (narrowly) survived the digital
revolution, in recent years the compact disc section has shrunk down
further and further, to the point where it's little more than a novelty;
a place where your Dad can grab best-of albums from Led Zeppelin or The
Who. From literally rows and rows of compact discs and several
"listening stations," big retailers like Best Buy have in many cases
shrunk their CD offerings to a small display at the end of a single
aisle.
Optical
digital data-storage was invented by Jim Russel who filed the first
patents in 1966, later purchased by Sony and Philips to develop the CD
Ah,
but that all changed in the winter of 1995, when my parents placed a
Discman under the Christmas tree, along with my first three CDs:
Collective Soul's incredible blue album, Soul Asylum's "Let Your Dim
Light Shine," and Foo Fighters' self-titled debut. For the next few
years, I rarely left the house without that clunky, BK Whopper-sized
device, which I connected to an old stereo when I got home. And, while
my collection of CDs was by no means large, or even particularly
impressive, I rarely went more than a month or so without thinking
about, pining for, and then finally pooling what little grass-cutting
money I had together to buy the next big album.
Right
around the same time, friends and coworkers at the grocery store where I
worked started talking about this new software that allowed you to
download songs or even whole albums without paying anything at all! What
was this fan-dangled technology, I wondered, and how can I get in on
it?
Fast-forward a decade or so and the CD is finally, finally being phased out
by the few retailers who still offer them. At Best Buy, one of the
handful of companies that's so far (narrowly) survived the digital
revolution, in recent years the compact disc section has shrunk down
further and further, to the point where it's little more than a novelty;
a place where your Dad can grab best-of albums from Led Zeppelin or The
Who. From literally rows and rows of compact discs and several
"listening stations," big retailers like Best Buy have in many cases
shrunk their CD offerings to a small display at the end of a single
aisle.
