Listen to Free Music

Ways to listen to free music

Almost half the people I know list ‘listening to music’ and ‘reading books’ as relevant hobbies during their free time on their resumes. So it’s safe to draw a conclusion based on the premise that most of us enjoy music in the studio or played live, at some point of time or the other in our lives. And of course, if this does not apply to you… you’ve obviously been living under a rock for sometime now… and seriously need to show some progress in acquired taste from the Neanderthal age into this one!
 
Music has experienced a transformation from LPs, cassette tapes, CDs and now the Internet… and of course, since we’re in the Age of Technology, Aquarius, brotherhood and so on and so forth … cyberspace gladly exploits the ideology of what it is to be ‘free’. Words like… Freedom, freebie, freefall and freek are characteristic of its place in society. OK, I’m exaggerating here… let’s stick to the first two.
 
If you’ve been an internet user for at least five to six years now, or as these corporate swine call it, a ‘power internet user’, you’ll also know that ‘freebies’ are part and parcel of the whole deal of generating traffic on the internet. And that’s the easiest way to listen to free music nowadays. And the internet, I feel, is the only way you can experience true freedom from that age-old rant: Everything in this world has a price.
 
In the 90s, the only free music I got was listening to the FM stations on the radio and copying the music played onto a cassette tape, most of which would require pristine hand-to-ear coordination that nanosecond like responses to record the songs you wanted on tape from start to end, of course. And we would go through this mental pain over and over again to update our catalogue of the latest Billboard hits at that time. And then one day, we solved this problem in a flash… yes, we found ourselves a day job which helped us buy music to which you might add, everything does come at a price. Well not just yet…
 
Then came the internet revolution… and with it almost every aspect of human life that could be digitalized… well, was converted from analog to digital. Yes, they didn’t even spare a ‘live recording’ of Steely Dan called ‘Bodhisattva’ from the 60s where the MC who had ‘one too many’ and took almost 8 minutes to introduce the band, for a 5 minute song. I almost died laughing listening to this old fart, who was seemingly oblivious to the idea of valuing other people’s time and was so pissed drunk that he couldn’t get the syllables right… let alone their names. Faux Pas… hardly, I think… just those truly authentic moments in music captured in time… and yes, I got to listen to it for free. Thanks to one of these pseudo-collectors on Kaaza. I had come a long way from ‘shafting’ the radio stations to get the songs I wanted.
 
Let’s face it… there are numerous sites [and I’m not going to insult your intelligence or mine by listing them out here] on which you can listen to free music. Use the keywords ‘free music online’ and you’ll find a gazillion sites that you can go to, where music is catalogued by genres, artists and time periods… thorough the medium of podcasting, internet radio, peer-to-peer networks and maybe just downloads that you just want to listen to at your convenience. With this ‘free’ access comes a whole lot of unwanted stuff such as ads, popups, hidden subscription fees… not to forget viruses, spyware, malware and so on and so forth… you know the score!
 
Alterhit, however operating as an online community also allows you to listen to free music online minus all these irritating ‘freebies’ that come along with it. You can just be a listener, artist [if you record your own, that is] or even a ‘record label’, and all these options allow you to make money by helping the community grow larger in the promotion of its music... and more importantly, clearly steering clear of this whole ‘piracy’ scam that is prevalent on the internet these days.
 
For those of you who believe that the best things in life come for free… how does the latest catch-phrase ‘I’m going to sue your ass’ sound?