Freegal: a potential source for free Christmas music

Hello everyone! Well, I guess 2012 was not my year for blogging. I had so many things going on at once that it quickly became impossible to post here. I make no guarantees about this year, but I'll certainly make an attempt to get some more content up here - it will all depend on what I find and how much time I have to write about it.

I've actually already started downloading some Christmas music this year, but I haven't listened to any of it yet. A couple of months ago I discovered that my local library subscribes to Freegal, which lets me download up to 3 songs a week from what seems to be a very extensive catalogue - "thousands of artists, tens of thousands of albums, and millions of songs," according to the site's FAQ. After spending the first 6 weeks downloading a couple of Patti Smith albums I didn't have on CD, I decided to start looking for Christmas music on the site, thinking that it would be best to start soon since there are now only 13 weeks left before Christmas. Since that gives me the chance to download 39 songs, I should be able to snag at least a few nice albums in time for Christmas.

The first Christmas album I started downloading from the service is Shawn Colvin's Holiday Songs and Lullabies, which has been on my wishlist for years, ever since I heard her version of "Love Came Down at Christmas" on a bootleg I downloaded. A couple of other albums I'm planning to download are Jimi Hendrix's Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (which only has 3 songs, so I can grab them all at once) and Martina McBride's White Christmas. I've actually had the latter album for a number of years now and it's one of my all-time favourites, but my copy is the original release with 10 songs on it; over the years I've seen it reissued a couple of times with more and more songs each time - my plan is to download the 6 songs that I don't have and combine them with the ones I do have to cobble together my own version of the latest version of the album.

I don't know how useful this post will be to most of you, as I really have no idea of how widespread the Freegal service is. Hopefully at least some of you have access to it - check with your local library to make sure. I have actually been hoping that we could do some crowdsourcing here - if anyone is aware of any good Christmas music on the site, please leave a comment about it here or send me an email, and maybe we can compile a list of the best Christmas music available on Freegal while there's still time to download at least some of it in time for this Christmas.

Happy listening!

New Content: A-M Classical

There's not really much information on the site about what exactly A-M Classical is, but the Christmas Carols page there has a wonderful collection of, well, Christmas carols. Like the last couple of features on this blog, most of the A-M Classical songs are all very mellow and relaxing and performed on a solo instrument; with a single exception, the instrument this time around is an organ.

There is a total of 20 songs currently available from the site. Almost all of them are traditional Christmas carols, and the sound of the organ gives them a stateliness that few other instruments could match. The lone exception is a lively, ornate version of "Jingle Bells" played on piano; it is one of the highlights of this collection, and it is also different enough that I hope a collection of piano music is in this site's future. A message on the site does say that more will be uploaded throughout the Christmas season.

For the time being, though, this is a very nice collection of relaxing Christmas music. Head over to A-M Classical and check it out for yourself.

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.