Free music

We hear a lot about the rights and wrongs of downloading music over the internet, and you probably read about the protests last week against the proposed new copyright law in NZ to try and stamp out illegal downloading.
I suspect that any attempts are doomed to failure, because music is simply so ubiquitous on the internet, and there are least three easy ways to access as much as you want. And a high proportion of this is legally free.
The most popular (and also the most dubious legally), is using software such as BitTorrent. Trying to keep it simple, BitTorrent is a way that people around the world can transfer large files to each other. Some estimate it accounts for about 35% of all traffic on the entire Internet. How it works is that a user makes files on his computer available to others, who in turn pass it on to yet more people. The dubious legality comes because the software can't distinguish which music is covered by copyright laws and which is not.
The second most popular method to obtain music is by listening to an internet radio station. There are thousands of these, covering absolutely every genre of music you could possibly conjure up, and some you wouldn't want to. Many of them allow you to set your own programme, so if you want you can listen to nothing but Barry Manilow (hey, I like Barry Manilow!) or solely Iron Maiden. Listening is absolutely legal. What you can also do - and here I am not sure of the legal status - is use any recording software and record the songs as they pass through your computer's sound card. Audacity, which I have mentioned in previous posts, will do the job.
Thirdly, there are many web-based applications that will either help you hunt out the kind of music you like, or search for free mp3's. A good starting place is simplespark.com
There was once a wonderful mp3 search engine called Singingfish. Unfortunately, it was bought out by AOL and shut down. But a replacement seems to be mp3realm, which might turn you up some interesting results.