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MP3 DRM-free Music Store
Dear Lazyweb,
I’m looking for a cool MP3 DRM-free online music store for european residents. Any suggestion?
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lucasr
Lucas Rocha is just a brazilian guy who loves hacking and music. He lives in the frozen lands of Finland with his lovely wife Carol. He works for Nokia in the development of Hildon and Maemo. In his free time, he's a happy GNOME contributor. He has a mustache, a beard and big smile in his face.
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17 thoughts on “MP3 DRM-free Music Store”
http://www.emusic.com – subscription based, but inexpensive, drm-free, and good variety
Amazon went drm free.
Radiohead has inrainbows.com which is DRM Free :)
It’s kind of special-purpose, but if you’re into electronic music (particularly IDM and dubstep), Bleep have been around for years now, and are brilliant. Boomkat are quite good, and have a wider electronic selection as well. Don’t know about non-electronic stuff though, sorry. :)
I use emusic. I don’t know that it counts as a “store” since it’s suscription-based, but I know it’s international at least USA and Australia and their music is DRM-less. Also Magnatune, though I don’t know if they work for Europe. It’s something of a usual suspect, so you may have eliminated already. Oh and if you like electronic, Warp records has their music store, bleep.com that sells DRM-less mp3’s and maybe flacs, IIRC. They’re based in the UK, so I’m sure they are Europe-friendly.
I assume that 1) you don’t want to use the usual trick of using a US address or similar, in which case you could use Amazon MP3, and 2) you don’t want to use something like mp3sparks?
I’ve seen several recommendations for http://www.emusic.com/ , if you don’t care about getting any particular song and just want something good in a given genre.
According to myresearch, there isn’t one, assuming that you want to buy actual chart music rather than independent stuff. If you’re not interested in finding songs that you’ve heard on the radio, but instead want to discover new music that you didn’t know about previously, then there’s eMusic, Magnatune, and Jamendo.
Well I hear http://www.thepiratebay.com is friendly to european residents unless you are french, wear funny hats, and like lots of ice cream. Now that is a different story altogether.
I use last.fm, the UK-based streaming radio station that learns what you like. As well as offering free mp3 downloads for certain tracks, it also lets you buy via a store called 7digital, though I’ve never used that service personally.
Although 7digital was primarily DRM’d WMA files it appears to have a growing selection of plain mp3 (it also seems they do MP4 video without DRM too):
The artists on that page seem a broad selection of popular music from Kylie to Pink Floyd via Radiohead
Actually, I tell a lie, I have used 7digital to buy mp3’s, they’re the store that the Super Furry Animals offers their new singles through and i got a bundle that included a free digital track with the physical copy.
A small mp3 store I have used and found good: http://www.levyvirasto.net/
It’s for Finnish indie music, but maybe there is still something interesting for you.
“DRM-free music outsells protected tunes four to one” at 7digital according to this recent story, so I assume they (and everyone ese) will be expanding their DRM free range.
http://www.emusic.com – subscription based, but inexpensive, drm-free, and good variety
Amazon went drm free.
Radiohead has inrainbows.com which is DRM Free :)
It’s kind of special-purpose, but if you’re into electronic music (particularly IDM and dubstep), Bleep have been around for years now, and are brilliant. Boomkat are quite good, and have a wider electronic selection as well. Don’t know about non-electronic stuff though, sorry. :)
I use emusic. I don’t know that it counts as a “store” since it’s suscription-based, but I know it’s international at least USA and Australia and their music is DRM-less. Also Magnatune, though I don’t know if they work for Europe. It’s something of a usual suspect, so you may have eliminated already. Oh and if you like electronic, Warp records has their music store, bleep.com that sells DRM-less mp3’s and maybe flacs, IIRC. They’re based in the UK, so I’m sure they are Europe-friendly.
Did you look at http://www.magnatune.com?
Nice selection and you can even buy OGG or FLAC.
I assume that 1) you don’t want to use the usual trick of using a US address or similar, in which case you could use Amazon MP3, and 2) you don’t want to use something like mp3sparks?
I’ve seen several recommendations for http://www.emusic.com/ , if you don’t care about getting any particular song and just want something good in a given genre.
According to my research, there isn’t one, assuming that you want to buy actual chart music rather than independent stuff. If you’re not interested in finding songs that you’ve heard on the radio, but instead want to discover new music that you didn’t know about previously, then there’s eMusic, Magnatune, and Jamendo.
Well I hear http://www.thepiratebay.com is friendly to european residents unless you are french, wear funny hats, and like lots of ice cream. Now that is a different story altogether.
Have checked out Magnatune, http://magnatune.com/ ?
Not sure what exactly you mean by “for european residents”, though…
a french one http://www.fnacmusic.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/
Tons of CreativeCommons music :)
I use last.fm, the UK-based streaming radio station that learns what you like. As well as offering free mp3 downloads for certain tracks, it also lets you buy via a store called 7digital, though I’ve never used that service personally.
Although 7digital was primarily DRM’d WMA files it appears to have a growing selection of plain mp3 (it also seems they do MP4 video without DRM too):
http://www.7digital.com/mp3
The artists on that page seem a broad selection of popular music from Kylie to Pink Floyd via Radiohead
Actually, I tell a lie, I have used 7digital to buy mp3’s, they’re the store that the Super Furry Animals offers their new singles through and i got a bundle that included a free digital track with the physical copy.
A small mp3 store I have used and found good:
http://www.levyvirasto.net/
It’s for Finnish indie music, but maybe there is still something interesting for you.
How about http://www.wippit.com/ ?
And if you speak dutch, http://www.mp3.nl
“DRM-free music outsells protected tunes four to one” at 7digital according to this recent story, so I assume they (and everyone ese) will be expanding their DRM free range.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071109-uk-music-store-drm-free-music-outsells-protected-tunes-4-to-1.html