Free music on the internet

Review blogs

This page contains links to resources I use to satisfy my craving for new music.

  • Acts of Silence focuses on experimental electronic music. Read on here if you want to expand your definition of music.
  • Netlabel Releases is a link list to over 1000 releases to netlabel music hosted on archive.org, released between as early as 1999 and 2012. Even better, that the page’s sources are hosted on GitHub. With that, you can browse by netlabel and even download all of the reviews for offline consumption.
  • CerebralRift is a lot like my blog, just with white background and more frequent reviews.
  • NetMusic Life is another review blog, currently featuring several hundred reviews, carefully tagged by netlabel and genre.
  • ClongClongMoo is another large-throughput portal for creative and experimental free netaudio, mostly Creative Commons licensed.

Major netlabels

Most of these netlabels have proven to publish quality music for extended periods of time. The others happen to offer music I like very much. I won’t tell you which ones are which… 🙂

  • blocSonic is a very professionally lead netlabel and creator of the netBloc compilation series, which I consider to be the best made compilation series of free music ever.
  • Clinical Archives with its over 500 (sic!) releases, is around since 2006 and never failing to surprise you with experimental, pop, rock, jazz, ambient or classical music.
  • diym netlabel (do it yourself musicians) thrills me because of the consistently high quality of their releases. They focus on acoustic, folky pop and soft rock and thus are an exception to the majority of electronic music netlabels.
  • Kahvi Collective has been publishing since the year 2000 and now over 300 releases of mainly electronic music.
  • Phonocake publishes electronic music, mainly IDM and melodic variations thereof.

Lists of netlabels

If you want catalogues of curated music with a distinct style, but are not satisfied with the above netlabels, give those comprehensive lists of netlabels (partly active, partly defunct) a try. Even if their official homepage is no longer available, most netlabels have their music securely archived in a sub-collection on archive.org:

The Source

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