New Content: last.fm Christmas tag free downloads

[Update: as of September 2009, free Christmas downloads on last.fm can be found right here.  It's a more direct route than the way I described in this post.]
Last.fm is a social music website that allows users to add tags to artists, albums, and tracks. These tags can be based on any criteria a user desires; unfortunately, the tags are not moderated, making it possible for users to tag an artist like The Wiggles with things like "death metal" and "viking metal". In general, though, the tagging system works quite well, as the more users there are that use a particular tag on a particular item, the more prominent that tag will appear on the item's page.


The tag I'm interested in at the moment is, not surprisingly, the "christmas" tag. Open up that page, and somewhere near the top you should see a link that looks like this:

FREE Track Playlist (see all tracks)

Click on that link and it will open up a list of all tracks tagged with "christmas" that can currently be listened to, in their entirety, for free. Mostly this just means that they can be streamed on demand; however, there are almost always at least a few tracks that can be downloaded for free, as specified by the artist or record label (in other words, these downloads are completely legal). Currently, there are free "christmas" downloads available from Lisa Loeb, Allison Crowe, Irish, Marshmallow Coast, and John Conklin.

Note that, as I mentioned above, the tags are not moderated, so some of these "christmas" tracks may not in fact be Christmas songs at all. It looks like most of them definitely are, though, so go ahead and check out the last.fm "christmas" tag to add a few more Christmas songs to your collection.