More and more music, movies, and other digital media have become available legally over the web. This web page lists several legal music sites (many of which offer music free of charge), several legal movie sites, and two sites with a variety of free and legal media.

Selected Legal Music Sites

    Music United's list of Legal Sites is a comprehensive listing of free, subscription, and pay-per-download sites. The Music United list makes an excellent starting place.

    Internet Radio sites such as Pandora, Last.Fm, or most of those listed at SHOUTcast or RadioTower.com also make music available legally, for free. So do many individual radio station. For example, Philadelphia's WXPN offers "My Morning Download."

  • IMEEM.com
    A social networking site with free streaming music from 4 of the major record labels. See this CNNMoney.com article for more information. (Free Music available as of February 2009)

  • Epitonic.com
    (Free music available as of February 2009)

  • Fingertips
    (Free music available as of February 2009)

  • GarageBand
    (Free music available as of February 2009)

  • GigaTracks
    (Free music available as of February 2009. The site was re-organized as a blog in July 2007. The music's still there; you have to browse the music using the Songs link in the lefthand column.)

  • MTVU
    MTV's mtvu.com web site offers a mixture of videos and music, mostly from new experimental bands.
    (Free music available as of February 2009)

  • Pure Volume
    (Free music available as of February 2009)

  • SoundClick
    (Free music available as of February 2009)

  • Many sites that offer music for sale offer a limited number of free downloads to generate interest in the music and thereby boost sales. The following list is a sampling of sites that fit in this category:

    • Apple iTunes
      Apple's iTunes store offers a limited number of free downloads each week. UD is an Apple iTunes Campus Partner!

    • amazon.com
      Look for "Digital Downloads," and subscribe to the site's weekly e-mail newsletter to receive a free download every week.

Selected Legal Movie Sites

All of the services listed below offer the opportunity to download movies legally. Some offer a subscription service, some offer pay-as-you-download or pay-as-you-view programs. Some have limited free offers.

Selected Multimedia Sites

Looking for material that is now in the public domain--and, therefore, available for free, legally? Visit
Internet Archive,
a web site with over 110,000 movies, 43,000 concerts, 218,000 audio recordings, and 300,000 texts.

Looking for copyrighted material that is licensed for personal use? Visit
Creative Commons,
a web site that allows authors, muscians, programmers, artists, scientists, and educators to license their copyrighted material to the public.

Legal Tunes at UD
Code of the Web Copyright Resources
Full list of Code of the Web Resources

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This material was last updated on February 9, 2009.