A guide to DRM free Living

Magnatune founder and CEO John Buckman likes to say that his company provides "Internet music without the guilt," according to a recent interview at Creative Commons. We'd like to say, "Thank you, John," for selling music without the locks imposed by DRM.

eMusic.com is the 2nd most popular online music store (just behind iTunes) and the most popular DRM-free store, with all tracks available in MP3 format. That means you never have to worry about whether tracks downloaded from eMusic will play on your iPod, your Rio, or your Zen music player. They're guaranteed to play on any music player you own. With over 1,000,000 songs from over 3,800 record labels, and no DRM... eMusic looks pretty nice.

Bleep.com is the highly successful online music store for UK darling Warp Records. If you're looking for electronic, dance and hip hop without all the DRM strings attached, visit bleep.com. Participating record labels include underground hip hop legends like Ninja Tune and Stones Throw records. All songs available as MP3s.

Zunior, "the little digital music store" offers full album downloads of a number of indie and alt-country darlings, including Neko Case and The Be Good Tanyas. Zunior takes a strong stand against DRM, believing that you should be able to play your music wherever you want. All songs available in DRM-free MP3 or CD-quality FLAC formats. Miss your album art? Album packages include PDF files of artwork and liner notes, so you go home happy. And at $8.88 per album, Zunior blows iTunes Music Store out of the water.

Nettwerk, the influential Canadian record label home to such pop giants as Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies and Dido, offers individual tracks and albums absolutely DRM-free. It's a great way to purchase directly from great artists who believe that DRM is bad for business and bad for fans.

CreativeCommons provides a great alternative to DRM'd music. Also, it's a great resource for learning more about music licensing. They regularly publish interviews with everyone from DJ Spooky, to Ottmar Leibert, to John Buckman, CEO of Magnatune.com.

This is a large collection of DRM-free music downloads in MP3 format. Although Amazon recommends to "Install the Amazon MP3 Downloader," we recommend against this, because it is proprietary software. You are able to purchase and download individual MP3 files of an entire album without the software, but you can not download an entire album in a single step.

Baen sells DRM-free ebooks from an assortment of science fiction and fantasy publishers, including Baen Books, Del Rey, and Tor. They also offer a number of no-cost downloads in their "Free Library", and offer a weekly subscriptions service called "Webscriptions."

The alternative country/rock-and-roll singer and songwriter, Ryan Adams is selling 10 of his albums as DRM-free, 256k MP3 downloads. Users have the option of purchasing individual tracks or "bundles" of an entire album.

Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nail have released a 36 track instrumental collection entitled Ghosts I-V under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. The first 9 tracks are available at no-cost as "high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF." They note that MP3s were encoded using the free software program, LAME, at 320kbps.