Mini Profile
Jason Sigal on 12/24/2009 at 11:00AM
Free Holiday Music Mix + Resources
There's a ton of free holiday music out there on the Internet. But a lot of it is low-quality, made using cheap MIDI sounds, or ripped from a CD illegally without the artists' permission (not in-line with the Holiday spirit). If you spend some time digging around aimlessly you might start to wonder...maybe it's not all worth digging through, especially in this time of year that we'd, at least in theory, rather spend with family than in cyberspace.
|
Well it is worth digging through if you can just get to the good stuff! The holiday season has inspired some amazing music. Everyone has their own taste of course (I'm more of a Song-Poem and awful[ly-good] music fan myself). But whatever your flavor, it's out there. And fortunately, there are some great resources for quality CC holiday music of all sorts, outlined below. As a starting-point for your visit to the Free Music Archive, I made this little mix (at left). Most of it is Creative Commons-licensed -- click the "i" next to each track for the specific license, and to learn more about each artist. Many of these artists have more free mp3s to share on the FMA, and a few of them have some Christmas-oriented collections. This mix is just the tip of the digital iceberg, on the FMA and beyond. |
More free (as in beer) holiday music resources after the jump, and please share your favorites by leaving a comment!
One of the best Creative Commons Christmas music resources we've found so far was compiled by Uwe Hermann, a developer and podcaster out of Germany. He started making this list of Creative Commons Christmas Songs in 2005, and it's since grown to link to over 250 songs. Among our favorites so far: the 8bitpeoples' 8bits of Christmas compilation, and the classic Jonathan Coulton tunes.
We asked some of our friends on Twitter (twiends?) for their favorite free Christmas music and Creative Commons holiday sounds:
LukeLibrarian compiled this CChristmas playlist on Delicious, spotlighting some cool stuff from ccMixter
Kamen reminded us how much we love Low's Christmas songs (which unfortunately aren't Creative Commons)
OuebeMusique pointed us towards our good friends the Bran Flakes (proprieters of the pioneering Comfort Stand netlabel!) who have a limited-time holiday single posted until the end of the year here.
A couple other resources:
the Free Christmas Music blog has links to a bunch of other great resources, though not all of them are Creative Commons-licensed.
AM Classical is a good one if you're in need of a super-permissive CreativeCommons-BY license, but -- like many of "those sites" -- they're all made with MIDI.
What else should we add?
