FREE (as in beer, speech) Musics

For those of you who are interested in free things, or the music of Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil (I know there are so many of you out there), this post should be of interest to you.

I'll skip to the part about the free music first. You can get it right here. Yeah, I know, most of you don't speaka dje Portuguese. It's not that hard to find your way to the good stuff though. You'll see a bunch of album covers, directly below which is a link to the site for that album. Click on it to get to the info and free downloads. But first, you may notice that below the link it says "com as musicas:" and then a list in bold. That is a list of all the tracks you can actually download for free from that album. So go there, look around, download some stuff, and leave a comment to let me know how it is, cause I haven't gotten around to listening to all of it yet. I do recommend Eta Carinae's album Mirando a Estrela because 1) it's really good and 2) you can download the whole album.

Now I'm nearly 100% sure that all the downloads you'll find there are legit. I've not generally known this site to blatantly violate copyrights. Also, the scene in Pernambuco is generally pretty into the Creative Commons. The group Re:Combo even got the CC to name one of the versions of their liscence after them. And Brazil's Minister of Culture is a pretty strong backer of the Creative Commons. So I'm guessing most of the songs available there are under some form of the CC liscence, and if not, the site has probably gotten some form of permission to give away their stuff. And speaking of Brazil's Minister of Culture and popular singer/songwriter, Gilberto Gil, and the Creative Commons, you can get one of his songs along with various others from the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, and others here from Wired Magazine's CC liscenced wired CD.

Now onto some further info for those of you who speake dje portuguese and are interested in the music of Brazil. If you care to keep up to date on mangue beat or any other music from the city of Recife or the state of Pernambuco, RecifeRock! is definitely the place to go. You'll find information on a vast number of bands and artists under Guia do Rock. Snoop around and you'll definitely find plenty more free MP3s and videos (of varying quality). On the front page you'll find the latest news, featured bands, and other stuff you might expect to find on a front page. If you should decide you need to purchase a CD from one of the many bands you'll find there, and can't find it on amazon or some such (in most cases you won't be able to) I recommend gemm.com. In fact I recommend gemm.com any time you need to buy a cd and can't find it anywhere else.