There is currently a revolution taking place in the music industry. It is common knowledge that music distribution has changed forever with the rise in prominence of digital downloads and the success of portable media players. The media has recently been full of speculation that the record label as we know it will soon disappear. This may or may not happen one day, but the change in the industry certainly isn’t just a recent development. High-profile recording artists have embraced the Internet as a creative and promotional tool since the mid-1990s and more recently have utilised the net as a medium for selling and distributing music independently. Listed below are just a handful of those pioneers. [Please add your own digital pioneers in the comments.]

Aerosmith

Aerosmith have had a long, interesting and varied career, spanning four decades and fourteen studio albums. However, it is a little known fact that Aerosmith offered the first full-length commercial download back in 1994. The track was called “Head First”, recorded initially for the “Get A Grip” album but was later rejected. Geffen Records and Compuserve teamed up to offer the download over their lighting-fast 56kbps connections. The track later appeared as a B-side, but internet history had already been made.

Nowadays there is much reported about the rise of illegally copied music being made available on the Internet. However, there is also plenty of music on the web that is free and legal. In this post we look at ten sites or services that offer free legal music to download.

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ArtistServer.com
ArtistServer has been around since 2001, albeit under the name ElectronicScene.com. In 2005 they transformed the site to widen their scope and incorporate social networking features. At its core is a database of over 7,000 songs that can be downloaded for free. An artist’s catalog also has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to like any other feed, allowing the user to keep up to date with any new additions. Photos, videos and blogs from artists complete this interesting site.

Note: this post is part of the R/WW Files on Online Music.

In July, I blogged about a new company planning to sell recordings of concerts on USB sticks as you leave the venue. Since then I’ve actually found articles proposing a similar idea that dates back to 2004, although I believe it was a slow starter then. Nowadays, USB sticks have surpassed floppy disks and even CDs as the most popular way to physically move data around, plus they have a much higher capacity than they used to, and are more physically robust.

This is an excellent way of making money out of every live recording an artist makes — usually only one live recording is sold on through CDs/DVDs — and I think people would love to have a recording of the gig that they were actually at, rather than buy a recording through a record store of one random concert. The USB keys could be customised with artwork from the current tour, or contain video footage and photos from the show, which in-turn would make them more collectible.