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I often visit http://kahvi.org/ for free relaxing electronic music albums.

While I haven't seen FLACs there, they do have the files available as OGG (and MP3, for those who haven't got RockBox installed yet).

The first one I came across a few years ago was Kahvi. Since then I've followed leads from Kahvi, and dug around to get more variety. I've found that the problem is not finding free (legal) music, but that it's difficult to such music that I actually like. Basically, about half of what I encounter is worth listening to more than once, and maybe one in ten releases I find are really good (worth listening to many times). That, and basically everything I find is electronic (which often comes in the form of somewhat boring ambient or arbitrary noise). Here's a few netlabels/artists/archives that I've been following that seem better than most:

http://kahvi.org/ (as described above - definitely some really good stuff here, if you can sift through the music that doesn't suit you from the hundreds of releases)

http://foem.info/ a blog that lists lots of free/non-RIAA releases

http://psilodump.se/ Psilodump is by far one of my favourites...his releases are scattered around in various locations (e.g., Kahvi, X-Dump), but they can be found

http://www.dinstalker.com/ Din Stalker is also a favourite...same story as above

http://x-dump.com/ A net label that also includes the above two artists, and has been featured on Kahvi

http://www.dirtybirdrexx.org/ A pretty cool netlabel I found via the FOEM blog

http://www.infinityloopmusic.com/ Also found via FOEM...fairly decent

http://mono211.com/ the monotonik netlabel + friends

http://archipel.cc/ the Archipel netlabel

http://acediamusic.org/ the Acedia Music netlabel

http://www.thinner.cc/ the Thinner/Autoplate netlabels


Of course, as others have pointed out already, many of these artists/netlabels have their media hosted by scene.org or archive.org - for the larger collections, it's sometimes easier just to browse the corresponding file repositories via FTP.

The first one I came across a few years ago was Kahvi. Since then I've followed leads from Kahvi, and dug around to get more variety. I've found that the problem is not finding free (legal) music, but that it's difficult to such music that I actually like. Basically, about half of what I encounter is worth listening to more than once, and maybe one in ten releases I find are really good (worth listening to many times). That, and basically everything I find is electronic (which often comes in the form of somewhat boring ambient or arbitrary noise). Here's a few netlabels/artists/archives that I've been following that seem better than most:

http://kahvi.org/ (as described above - definitely some really good stuff here, if you can sift through the music that doesn't suit you from the hundreds of releases)

http://foem.info/ a blog that lists lots of free/non-RIAA releases

http://psilodump.se/ Psilodump is by far one of my favourites...his releases are scattered around in various locations (e.g., Kahvi, X-Dump), but they can be found

http://www.dinstalker.com/ Din Stalker is also a favourite...same story as above

http://x-dump.com/ A net label that also includes the above two artists, and has been featured on Kahvi

http://www.dirtybirdrexx.org/ A pretty cool netlabel I found via the FOEM blog

http://www.infinityloopmusic.com/ Also found via FOEM...fairly decent

http://mono211.com/ the monotonik netlabel + friends

http://archipel.cc/ the Archipel netlabel

http://acediamusic.org/ the Acedia Music netlabel

http://www.thinner.cc/ the Thinner/Autoplate netlabels


Of course, as others have pointed out already, many of these artists/netlabels have their media hosted by scene.org or archive.org - for the larger collections, it's sometimes easier just to browse the corresponding file repositories via FTP.

What Internet radio stations do you listen to and why?

Digitally Imported is pretty much it

What online artists do you enjoy listening to who release their work free?

The Kahvi Collective are an entire online label, with new releases in an RSS feed for automatic downloading; I've got 6.4GB of high quality ogg / mp3 so far~

• Kahvi Collective -- ambient / electronic / chillout; 700 tracks, all free as in beer, mix of ogg and mp3 (much of the archive is available in both). This free music is the only stuff I've insisted on paying for in the past year :P
• The Scene had some great backing music; each episode has links to artists' sites, which tend to have more of the same, for free. I can't seem to find season 1 though, and season 2 sucked :(
• scene.org (a different scene to the one above) has a huge archive of demoscene music; typically electronic / dance

I'm sure there must be more huge archives of free music, and genres other than electronic; anybody know of any?

Very funny. You know, if you actually happened to have some music in that format, or any other that iPods don't support (and iPods are pretty bad as supporting a variety of audio formats goes) I think you'd find that no matter how absolutely reality-distortingly fantastic the original iPod firmware is in every other regard, it's pretty damn useless if you cannot listen to your music.

You don't even have to willingly rip your music to Vorbis - maybe you like listening to Net labels such as this one.

try visiting some net labels. You can find a lot of legal / legit sites listed at archive.org. Some I like are Kahvi Collective and Thinnerism although Thinner seems to prefer IE browsers and MP3 over Ogg, but you can work around it. The pieces are Creative Commons licenced, so it's free, but if you like these groups, consider donating them some money.

If you're not into techno, Thinner's sister label AutoPlate is good too.

Net labels are the way of the future. I've considered entering the music business, and from what I am seeing, media groups like RIAA / ARIA offer no market advantage over the Net now, and frankly I reckon I can make more money and get at least as wide a distribution without a corporate music label's help, thanks very much.

As for mainstreme penetration of music into the Net, RIAA and Apple are doing a grand job of advertising the fact that you can get music off the Net, thanks.

Now it is up to more musicians to shurk the big music companies that only serve to rip you off (witness complaints by Michael Jackson, Prince and others over their own deals). Get on the net, distribute your tracks yourself and be free -- you may even make a living in your own lifetime.

try visiting some net labels. You can find a lot of legal / legit sites listed at archive.org. Some I like are Kahvi Collective and Thinnerism although Thinner seems to prefer IE browsers and MP3 over Ogg, but you can work around it. The pieces are Creative Commons licenced, so it's free, but if you like these groups, consider donating them some money.

If you're not into techno, Thinner's sister label AutoPlate is good too.

Net labels are the way of the future. I've considered entering the music business, and from what I am seeing, media groups like RIAA / ARIA offer no market advantage over the Net now, and frankly I reckon I can make more money and get at least as wide a distribution without a corporate music label's help, thanks very much.

As for mainstreme penetration of music into the Net, RIAA and Apple are doing a grand job of advertising the fact that you can get music off the Net, thanks.

Now it is up to more musicians to shurk the big music companies that only serve to rip you off (witness complaints by Michael Jackson, Prince and others over their own deals). Get on the net, distribute your tracks yourself and be free -- you may even make a living in your own lifetime.

*coughshamelessplugcough*

The demoscene, a collection of artistist nerds making cool little animations, spawned something of great importance: the netlabel scene.

Now I'm not sure if the demoscene is as large as it was when I was a part of it (future crew days), the netlabels are bursting at the seams and there is A LOT of high quality music in many different genres available. Several promiment artists have their roots in the netlabel scene when trackers were still #1 (Fast Tracker, Scream Tracker, Impulse Tracker), but now adays, while trackers are still in use (Buzz, MPT, Renoise), there are a lot of home studios and garage bands releasing music through netlabels as mp3s and oggs.

Thinnerism
Ronin Collective
Camomille
Kahvi
One


There are also two main repositories where netlabel releases are uploaded, available at:
Scene.Org
Archive.Org's netlabel repository

These netlabels are starting to be taken a lot more seriously these days, and has even attracted corporate attention. Mercedez Benz's "Soundtrack of the Autobahn" contained several prominent netlabel artists.

While 90% of the music available is electronic in nature, there are still some artists (including myself) that are hitting up other genres. It's just a matter of looking. Some of these artists go on tours, and in some cases, the netlabel itself sponsors their artists for tours.

So for people who want to seek non corporate tainted music, the netlabel scene is where to look.

For me this view seems to be far from the current reality.

I predict that people will not move from free and DRMless p2p to the iTMS or any other comparable offer. Some may, but not nearly the majority. What's more, buying real music CDs will still be the preferred method of obtaining music in the foreseeable future and people will continue to rip their tracks themselves to the format that they find the most convenient.

The codec wars will be fought on p2p where LAME-encoded MP3 is still the standard but other formats are increasinly appearing and you can bet that WMA or even AAC aren't the fastest increasing.

Secondly, they will be fought in the encoder software area where only Ogg Vorbis is free even in the beer sense. From what I've seen, a large number of both players and rippers already support vorbis. Here Microsoft has a small chance of ending up on top because WMA ripping has been made easy in XP but I suspect most people will still know better.

The third area where it'll be fought are small, independent artists and labels such as kahvi. Many of them have already moved to Vorbis.

I think nothing will seriously threaten mp3s for a while but of the possible challengers I feel Vorbis has a very good chance of prevailing over the others.

Good ambient - electronical - naturemusic can be downloaded for free from www.kahvi.org in .ogg and .mp3 formats. You also can order a CD from there (obviously, not copy protected).