A screenshot of Saregama.com

All of us love to listen to music, but most of us would rather get it for free than go to a shop and buy an album. You may not want the whole album, but just two or three songs. In the pre-Internet days, we would borrow cassettes and try to make a copy. But things are a lot easier now. All you have to do is log on to the Net and find the song you are looking for. We are making the music companies very angry, but we persist.

Free and legal music has existed ever since the advent of the radio. Log on to the Internet and you will find sites that stream music. They are free, but all are not necessarily legal. The best part of this is that you will find all genres of music. You will be surprised at the collection of Bengali and Hindi music at the Apple’s iTunes store. But then Apple is in the business of selling songs. Moreover, iTunes Store is still not available from India. So even if you want to buy from there you cannot. However, this will soon change.

With the advent of the iPhone in India, sooner or later we will have to get into the habit of buying songs. Apple will never allow downloads of free music, unless you find a way to crack the software. Here are some sites from where you can buy your music at a nominal rate.

Saregama.com

With over 4.76 million songs www.saregama.com holds the rights to over half the music ever recorded in India. They have tie-ups with Universal, EMI and Venus. You even get English and Hindi movies here. The songs sold at the site are encrypted. This means when you buy a song you will not be able to share it with anybody. This is called Digital Rights management (DRM). There are DRM-free songs too, but they cost a lot more.

According to Gautam Sarkar, who heads New Media at Saregama, the company plans to introduce giant plasma screens at shopping malls across the country from where you can download songs into your laptop, iPod or mobile at the touch of a button. Even the Music World outlets could be equipped with this feature.

Sarkar admits that hackers can break the encryption and then share the music, but these people are few in number, in the age group of 14 to 20. Those over 35 years do not want any hassles and would rather pay for their music. Saregama is in the process of tracking down free sites that stream their music illegally, but Sarkar admits it is a very difficult process.

Hamaracd.com

Here you can select your favourite songs and the site will write them to a CD and mail it to you. The prices are different for visitors from India and those from outside. www.hamaracd.com is part of the Saregama network.

Raaga.com

Www.raaga.com with 3.5 million unique visitors used to distribute music illegally till they recently settled with Saregama for a huge sum of money. Raaga.com is based in Hong Kong and run by a husband-and-wife team from a single room. They still are one the biggest distributors of Indian music.

There are other sites that still distribute free music. Web radio stations stream free music and can find you songs that match your taste. You can even select the song you want played.

Here are some sites that stream music.

Musicindiaonline

At www.musicindiaonline.com, you can make customised “virtual” albums of your favourite songs; mail them to friends; share them with everyone on the web; and, of course, save them to your hard-drive and share them with more people.

Jango, Lastfm

(www.jango.com, www.last.fm)

If you want to rock then these are the sites for you. Everything is so simple. Just type in an artist’s name, and Jango will find a streaming “station” based on that artist. Fine-tune the station by adding more bands and rating songs. Both are like social networking music sites.

Google and Yahoo Tips and Tricks

Have you been trying all day to find a song? Here is how you can find it in a few seconds. Enter this search term in Google: “parent directory” mp3 OR wma OR ogg OR wav [[Bob Dylan]] -html -htm -download –links.

For Yahoo enter the search term as follows: “parent directory” AND (Mr Tambourine Man) AND (mp3 OR wma OR ogg) AND NOT(“download”) AND NOT(“links”).

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