Retro Hound

Free Music Online – 3 Legal Sources

I love music. I’m a music omnivore. There are lots of places to get music online, but my tree favorites are Wolfgang’s Vault, The Internet Archive, and The Retro Cocktail Hour.

“Wolfgang” is famed concert promoter Bill Graham. He was a German immigrant and changed his name. He started the Filmore (AKA Filmore West) and Filmore East, as in The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East. He kept an amazing amount of memorabilia and recorded concerts like mad. Wolfgang’s Vault is making it available. 1960s through 1980s, mostly Classic Rock. You can listen to full concerts from acts as diverse as The Band, Black Sabbath, Elvis Costello, Jimi Hendrix, Journey, Jimmy Buffett, MC5, The Police, The Rolling Stones, U2, Frank Zappa, Van Halen, or Van Morrison. They have two concerts from my favorite band, The Call. You can buy and download some of the concerts as well as purchase rock memorabilia such as posters, tickets, t-shirts, old Rolling Stone Magazines, etc.

These next guys don’t have graphics that are easy to use.

The Internet Archive (home of the Wayback Machine where you can see what web sites used to look like) has a huge section of free concerts and music. They have the Live Music Archive with 62,320 concerts as of this writing. A lot of bands you won’t have heard of, but a lot have very strong followings. While Classic Rock is at Wolfgan’s Vault, the LMA is mostly Alternative music. The Rainmakers are one one of my favorites. Some of the acts here include …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Billy Bragg, Blues Traveler, Bob Walkenhorst (lead singer and songwriter of the Rainmakers), Butthole Surfers, Camper Van Beethoven, Country Joe McDonald, Cowboy Junkies, Cracker, Death Cab for Cutie, Dream Syndicate, Drive-By Truckers, fIREHOSE, Fishbone, Fugazi, Gin Blossoms, Harvey Danger, Local H, Los Lonely Boys, Maroon5, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, My Morning Jacket, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Radiators, Seven Mary Three, Smashing Pumpkins, Soft Boys, Soul Coughing, Southern Culture On The Skids, Stockholm Syndrome, String Cheese Incident, The Animators, The Decemberists, Throwing Muses, Toad The Wet Sprocket, just to name a few.

One caution with IMA is that the formats are not all easily listened to. Some of the people putting up the concerts are puristis and MP3 just isn’t good enough quality for them.

Live Music Archive, goto browse, Audio Archive where you can do a search for something like “blues.” Mostly older recordings off 78s, or newer stuff from people you’ve never heard of.

The last is the Retro Cocktail Hour from the NPR station in Lawrence Kansas, home of the University of Kansas. If you like lounge music, this is the place for you. Les Baxter, Henry Mancini, Esquivel, Toots Thielemans, Xavier Cugat, stuff like that. I used to listen to this every Saturday night, but we live too far away now. They have a CD givaway also. Check it out.

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008, by Robert Lindsey and is filed under "Music, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Alternative, Classic Rock, Lounge ". You can leave a response here, or send a Trackback from your own site.