Downloading Music For Free – LEGALLY!

Downloading digital music off the Internet became the latest trend in around 1999 when companies such as Napster allowed home users to download free, but illegal, music using their respective peer-to-peer (P2P) software. You may remember the big legal battles that these companies went through against the music industry, then shortly after were shut down for a period of time.

iMesh was a part of those legal battles, however unlike Napster, Grokster and Kazaa, iMesh prevailed with a $4.1 million payment and continued on. iMesh recently launched a new service that enables users to share about 15 million free songs and videos with P2P file sharing that is 100% legal. Over two million are original high-quality songs licensed from the record labels. iMesh is able to do this because of an agreement it signed with digital music distributor MusicNet to supply it with songs. MusicNet’s collection includes inventory from Virgin, HMV, Yahoo!, and AOL.

Unfortunately you won’t find all songs on there for free, but the ones that do not have licensing agreements (are copyrighted), you have to pay $0.99, the same price that Apple’s iTunes sells its music for. All the songs that I happened to search for on iMesh came up free. If you anticipate downloading a lot of music, and are a more discriminating music downloader, you can pay $6.95 a month for the Premium Tracks. Or, if you’re like me, you can just stick to the free P2P and disregard the monthly subscription fee.

iMesh will definitely be a competitor to the iTunes Music Store, RealNetwork’s Rhapsody and Napster (no longer a P2P service). Why would you want to pay $0.99 a song when you can legally download it for free? Don’t get me wrong, I still like iTunes, but I guess I’m just a little bitter that over the years, they’ve collected a few hundred dollars of my money over from so many downloads . . . ouch! Oh well. Additionally, I’m impressed with iMesh’s download speeds. I’ve downloaded songs as quickly as 30 seconds, and entire albums (containing 10-12 songs) within two minutes. That is much faster than I’ve ever downloaded anything off of iTunes. A soon-to-be competitor to iMesh is MashBoxx. It will offer legal P2P services very similar to iMesh. There is no official launch date on when this will launch, but you can sign-up to be a beta tester at www.mashboxx.com.

If it makes you feel any better for the artists’ sake, iMesh’s website includes a link for artists to register with them for the ability to monetize their content or prevent it from being traded on the iMesh network. Mesh your own free music together from www.imesh.com. Sorry Mac users, iMesh is only available for the Windows platform at this time.