Microsoft has partnered with the independent music download site ReverbNation to offer more than 1,000 songs absolutely free. The only catch is that a Microsoft banner has been superimposed over the album artwork on each of the songs. Therefore, when you are listening to the song in a music player that displays album artwork, you will see the MS banner. That’s all there is to it.
You can head over to ReverbNation and download any or all of the songs you want. All of the songs are by independent artists trying to get their name out to the masses, but that doesn’t mean that they are all completely obscure. I was pleased to see that Celldweller (from whom I learned of this deal), Fishbone, the Lemonheads, UnderOath and quite a few other artists I enjoy were on the list. Each artist offers a single song for free.
The musical styles vary greatly, from pop to funk to hip hop to metal to folk and everything in between. No matter what kind of music you enjoy, I’m sure there’s a handful of songs available that will interest you. The tracks are available in M4A and MP3 formats.
The main downside to this offer is that you have to download each track individually. There is no way to select multiple tracks and download them all at once. Still, this is an amazing program, the likes of which (at this magnitude, at least) has never been seen before.
Below is a video put out by Microsoft explaining the new program.
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[…] having to scroll through a long list. I recently added all 1,000 (actually 1,005) of the free songs Microsoft offered through ReverbNation to my Zune. Unfortunately, each of those songs is tagged with a different artist name, which means […]