How To Download Music From The Internet

A Guide for the Confused.

Reposted from Facebook.

I've had some people asking me how to find music lately so here are the answers to those questions.

I find most of my music these days using Google Blog search.
Step One. Pick an album you want to download. Two, go to Google Blog Search and type in the album name/artist. Look for the links that don't look totally sketchy. Unlike a web search, you might have to dig a little deeper than just the first few results. Alternatively, just check out the aggregates in the links below. They look good.

The downloads are usually uploaded to rapidshare/megaupload/zshare, etc. If you're looking to download a bunch at once, go for the links that aren't to rapidshare since they make you wait a while between each download. (And enter a bunch of fucking cats) You can do a couple downloads in a row with Megaupload, and other sites have even high limits. Most of these sites have prohibitions against downloading more than one thing at once, but there's generally a variety of options of where to download from.

Here's the fun part. Once you find the album, which is usually on a blogspot blog, look around the rest of the blog, because they'll have things related to what you were looking for and it's a good way to discover music. These blogs also have long lists of links on the side to other music blogs. I usually open all the cool sounding ones in new tabs and go apeshit downloading everything I can that sounds good or looks interesting. Here's a list of blogs that I've found cool stuff from.

General Experimental Music

Mutant Sounds They write reviews too, which is cool. Lots of Krautrock/related.
Rusted Noise Industrial stuff
Silent Noise Control All sorts of weirdness.
Because God Told Me To Do It Weird shit.
Tonton Mahood More of the 'rock' side of experimental, but still a buncha weird shit.
Deleted Scenes, Forgotten Dreams All these experimental blogs have cool weird stuff, actually.
DualTrack Recently posted a horror movie starring Tiny Tim as a clown, if you're into that.
Experimental, Etc Lots of good stuff here.
Museum of Imaginary Histories They write reviews too.
The Thing on the Doorstep I ended up with some cool post-punk (I think?) stuff from this blog.
A Closet of Curiosities Lotta field recordings on this one.
Astraal Tempel RhytHymns Drone, krautrock, anything with a more meditative vibe.
Electronix Obscure

Grab Bag

Staring at the Apocalypse
It's Coming Out of Your Speaker
Infinite-Machine Everything from Jazz to Anarchopunk. There's a bunch of Crass up right now.
Psychotic Leisure Music More than just the name.
Square Dancing in a Round House They categorize by genre on the side-bar, which makes it easy to explore.
Anticonsciousness Hipster stuff, I think. I dunno?
In the Crowd! "Soul, Blues, Jazz, R&B, Ska, Punk, All Stuff and More" to quote.
Querbeet From William Basinski, Miles Davis, Flipper, Einsturzen Neuabaten, Devendra Banhart, Brianiac. Just to name some shit.
Seven Spaces of Empty Place "Pop/Psych/Folk/Noise/Jazz/World and other things..."
Chronic Music
Musical SchizophreniaIndie/Rock/Hip-Hop
Caucasian Tabloid
Steal Bars Check out the Ratatat remixes. Also, they have some rare Girl Talk.

World

Awesome Tapes from Africa Legit.
Sun of Latin Music
Abracadabra- LPs do Brasil LPs from Brazil.
Brazilian Nuggets More on the Brazilian music tip.
Reggae Roots Downloads One love, man

Funk/Soul

Funky16Corners This guy knows what's up when it comes to all things soulful.
Iron Leg The 'Other Blog' of the Funky16Corners guy. Focuses more on Garage/Psychedelia. Check the Digital Trip archives.
Sounds of the 70s More than just funk, but that too.

Hip-Hop

The Smoking Section For more mainstream rap. They're good at posting stuff that's going to be popular before it is, for those of you concerned with that.
Beats and Blood Mostly hip-hop. Currently some Glam-Rock goin' on.
Real Hip Hop Beholders
The Essence of Hip Hop
[ [ dope blog fresh ] ]Both dope and fresh, I suppose.
The Hip-Hop Collection
Diggin in da (indie)cratez Unheard of vinyl rips
Hip Hop - 12"
Underground Hip Hop Collection Blog
Original Underground Hip Hop I had no idea that Nas was 'underground,' but so it goes.
Underground Rap US & French
Strickly 4 th G's Please, no non-G's.
The Best BLOG of Hardcore RAP
Strictly Beats Instrumental stuff
Underground Dirty Rap Shaolin Soul
Underground Hip-Hop for Dummies Only for dummies.
Another Sound Mission Lots of influential artists/albums

Electronica/Dance

The Sexy Result The only decent strictly electronica/dance blog I've found so far. It's alright.

Aggregates

Link Talk This is a forum. Referred by Elliot. Looks like they have a ton.
Chewbone
XChannel

Wishlist

This is stuff I want that I either haven't found or haven't looked for yet. Lemme know if you find anything.
-Movies. Apparently you can download whole movies in good quality online. Where? How?
-80s/New Wave, beyond the usual litany of 80's one hit wonders- or the albums the good ones are from.
-Disco, not the mainstream stuff, but stuff from when Disco was still an underground thing
-Good Dance Music, whatever you think that means.
-Some Masters at Work, Frankie Knuckles or other early Chicago House music
-Jungle, not the watered down stuff. ShyFX and related artists would be good.
-Oldies, pop and rock & roll from the 50's, 60's. It'd probably be in a torrent, but I'd like some sort of compilation that's basically all the stuff they play on oldies radio
-The GTA IV soundtrack
-More Trip-Hop

Alright, there it is. That's how I find music online. Hope that helps those of you that were asking. If you have a method for finding music, what is it? What are some good sites? Let me know.

Don't be an elitist fuck, share music. Being greedy doesn't make you cool, it kills music.

Any questions, ask.