How to use Google to download free music online (MP3s, OGGs, etc)

Posted on March 5, 2008 at 6:34 am

Looking for a legal way to download music onto your computer? If you’ve been using Kazza or other file sharing programs to download music, you could get into big trouble and it’s best to avoid it altogether. However, Google indexes hundreds of thousands of MP3s, WMAs, and OGGs that are stored in open directories all over the world and which you can download for free without worrying about legal issues.

Finding free music downloads using Google

All you need to do is know how to create a query in Google that will find the exact song you are looking for. Here’s how to find MP3 files in open directories using Google:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” “Last modified” mp3

The inurl filter and intitle filters are used to find the open directories on the Internet. The mp3 filter at the end tells Google to look inside of these directories for any files with mp3 in the name. You can also search for WMA and OGG by changing the value of mp3.

You can also create a more specific query, i.e. for a particular band or song, by adding more filters after the mp3 filter. For example, here I am searching for Britney Spears songs:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” mp3 “britney spears”

There are a couple of ways you can search for music using Google search and I will list out a few more that I have used before for finding music via Google search:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Britney Spears”

This one is slightly longer, but does pretty much the same thing. As you can see it includes a few more filters that are not present in the first search mentioned. You can try out both and see which one gives you better results. Using both, I’ve been able to find tons of songs related to Britney Spears, not just her own, including parodies, remixes, etc.

Finding free MP3 downloads via del.icio.us

You can also find a lot of free music using the popular bookmarking service del.icio.us. Basically, you have to perform a custom search in order to find MP3 files that have been tagged. You can do this by typing in:

http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3

This will give you a nice list of MP3s that have been indexed on del.icio.us. If you want to find items tagged for a specific artist or band, you can use the following URL:

http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3+Britney Spears)

Pretty neat! If you want to download the song to your computer, you just have to right-click on the link and choose Save Link As or Save Target As.

You can of course use Bit-Torrent clients to download free music online also, but it’s more risky again because of legal issues. It’s best to stick to the free methods listed above as they will not get you slapped with a lawsuit! Read my earlier post on how not to get caught downloading illegal music.

You can also check out MP3 blogs and MP3 Blog Aggregators as they routinely put up free downloads to the latest music for a specific period of time.

If you’re just in the mood to listen to the latest music, but not download it, you can check out to really cool sites, Seeqpod and Songza, that I had written about earlier. Enjoy!

Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to Online Tech Tips via RSS Feed or via Email and receive free daily productivity tips.

» Filed Under Computer Tips