And how could I forget?!!

The Hype Machine!!!! Silly me. One of the best... for new MP3s...for free... Explanation: Every day many people update their MP3 blogs with new MP3 links. The Hype Machine (which incidentally has a brand new URL) then collects and catalogues all these minute by minute. Taking time zones into effect means that there is a new couple of songs going on there every few seconds really. You can see a list of all the new tracks on the front page with links to all of the blogs that published them. The redeeming feature of the Hype M is the pop-up player. You load it up and click on a track to play. It will then carry on playing through all the music in a chronological order. I tend to press "play" and do the washing up and wait for something good to pop up. Try it out yourself.

The Hype Machine

The only drawback is that if you're in a workplace with heavy censoring software you may find your path is blocked to this particular palace of MP3-worshipping delight.

3hive yourself!

You know, if there's a cool band you want to check out, some weird American folk guitarist or some noise "post" rock or something. You know where I go, don't you? To the record shop!!! Ah, just joking. I mean when I'm staring at some computer monitor while the world flies by all around me. Where do I go?? Which website??? You should already know the answer. It's called 3hive . As you can see, the labels or tags for this post are "MP3" and "free". That's because that's exactly what you get with 3hive. You're also safe in the knowledge that there is no piracy taking place and you're not ripping any bands off or funding gangs or something. All (most of) the MP3s are tracks that the band have put up for free on their own sites. What 3hive does is to collect these tracks together on a daily basis. The beauty though is that the songs are all categorized into genre (style), band and record label etc. If you fancy a bit of post-rock then u just click on that button. There is another favourite MP3 blog of mine that almost competes with 3hive though. Its called mp3blog.ch.
MP3blog.ch feels more like a blog than 3hive which feels more like a database as it is so organized. Check it out!!!
mp3blog.ch

Step 3

Ahaaa!! Step 3... this is really the only stage that I regularly use to feed my mp3 blog - Clik and Lissen. For Step 3 you will be using a website called Exploseek. The web address is just that - http://www.exploseek.com/. It's like Google for MP3s. In fact, that's exactly what it is. It sends a query or a question to Google that says "give me only MP3s!

Step 2
Then I would tend to try elbo.ws if it's a band that might be getting some recognition recently in the past couple of years, say.

Elbo.ws compliles and orders all the MP3s that have been posted by any Mp3 blog that has registered with them. You can search for an artist and you're almost sure to find some Mp3s and the links to the blog posts that "advertised" the tracks.

If you're not sure what an "Mp3 blog" is......it's a blog that regularly has MP3s available to download for free. Normally the idea is to promote the band rather than pinching their music.

Step 1

Try the legal sites compiling the MP3s that bands post on their websites.

e.g. 3hive for indie/experimental/folk/hiphop

musicportal for indie/metal/doom/grind

3hive is great (my personal fave) because it just builds and builds everyday but all the tracks that you can download are all put into styles - country, hip hop, slowcore, electronica etc. You basically read a couple of lines about the band and then download it if you fancy the sound of it. And you don't feel guilty about the MP3s because they're all from the bands' actual sites.If nothing shows up then go to step 2.