Music

Containing sound recordings from 25 collections at the Library of Congress, these include American music, oral histories, and speeches.

The Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection provides online access to digital audio files of cylinders in the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive at Syracuse University Library. Digital recordings are accessible in both MP3 and WAV file format.

Some of the first commercial recordings made, the originals were etched into wax and then transferred to metal cylinders in the late 19th and early 20th century. Now these thousands of recordings of all types -- from spoken word to many styles of music -- are available here to stream within a browser or online radio or download as MP3.

This interactive library provides high-quality, legal audio downloads from many genres. Directed by WFMU, a New Jersey-based freeform radio station, all audio on this site can be downloaded for free and has been copyright-cleared for remix projects, production soundtracks, etc.

The Internet Archive's Live Music library is an audio archive of live recordings that are availabliity royalty-free and at no cost. This collection contains material from artists who like the idea of noncommercial distribution. All recordings are preserved in archival compresssion formats like Shorten or FLAC, to achieve the highest quality of preservation.

Historical recordings are made available to the public free of charge, thanks to the Library of Congress and its National Jukebox site. The site includes thousands of recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925.