How to Download Free Music to iTunes

Finding Free Music Files

1. Visit websites that offer free MP3 downloads. There are a number of websites that offer free music downloads. You may not find the biggest hits, but you can find a good variety of new artists that want to share their music.

   1. Jamendo
   2. SoundClick
   3. Internet Arhive

2. Download free mix-tapes. Hip-hop acts, both mainstream and underground, have embraced a new digital way of networking, revolving around free downloads of album-length projects called mix-tapes. As old analog mix-tapes were once passed from artists to record execs, new mix-tapes are available for free online as a way of advertising new music and keeping buzz around established artists.

   1. Some artists choose to release mix-tapes directly from their own websites, DatPiff offers many free mix-tapes for download.

3. Find up-and-coming artists. Many up-and coming artists offer free music on their bandcamp or SoundCloud pages or from their own website. Many big-name artists are also starting to offer music on a pay-what you-want scale.

   1. Pay-what-you-want pay scales often look as if you're going to be required to pay, but you can just insert a zero in the payment window. You won't be charged anything.

4. Subscribe to music podcasts. Many online radio shows and podcasts will play music that allow you to essentially listen to music for free. While you won't be able to download the individual tracks, you can subscribe to the podcast and listen to free tunes as much as you want. Free music podcasts available for downloading to your mobile device or desktop computer include:

   1. Country Classics. Hosted by Joe Bussard, the man with the largest collection of 78 rpm records in the world, this podcast features pre-war country, blues, and hillbilly music. It's a wonderful collection of oddities hosted by a total weirdo. And it's free!
   2. Theme Time Radio Hour. Originally included on Sirius XM Radio, you can download all of Bob Dylan's radio show, featuring everything from Koco Taylor to the Beastie Boys, for free online.

5. Download the audio tracks off of YouTube videos. You can find an enormous collection of music on YouTube, and many websites offer video-downloading services that allow you to download a file that contains the stripped audio track of a YouTube video, allowing you to paste in the URL of a YouTube video, it'll give you an MP3 track of just the sound.

   1. Listen to YouTube, Tube To MP3, and YouTube to MP3, and All2MP3 are freeware programs that will all accomplish this for you. Download the software, install it, and copy the link into the browser. These will produce MP3's, so you can put them right into iTunes.
   2. The best trick is to find artists on YouTube first and then browse their profiles for links to other media-sharing sites, where they may make available more extensive discographies of their music, check out their Bandcamp pages or other social media for options and for new artists.

6. Get music from your friends. Ask friends whose taste you trust to make you mix CDs of their favorite songs and then upload them into your iTunes list. Better yet, there are many file-storing and sharing services available for free, like Dropbox, which allows you to store documents, files, and folders online that you can share with others. Make your own separate accounts, and then simply have them drop any good tracks they have into a shared folder that you can retrieve from your own computer and onto iTunes.

7. Download Torrent files using a client. Torrents are large, encrypted files that need to be unpacked after downloading, using a Torrent downloading client, such as uTorrent or Frostwire. Use online torrent finders like Pirate Bay to find specific files and unpack and download them using the torrent client, or just search directly on the client itself. Once downloaded, drag and drop the files directly into iTunes to listen.