85,000 free tracks from independent artists — Libre.fm

In February the indie music site Libre.fm added a way for all artists using the platform to collect donations from their fans via Flattr. It’s time to review the service and some interesting artists.

What is Libre.fm?

They are the Last.fm of the indie music with 100% independent artists who license their music freely. That’s about the only hard rule they have. Everyone’s welcome to join to either listen or upload their own tracks and use it as another channel to promote their music.

Libre has signed up over 7500 artists who have shared close to 85,000 free tracks that have been listened to over 4,8 million times. That means that on average a track has been listened to over 50 times. There must be some good music up on their site.

Libre.fm team is a big advocate of privacy and open software so if you’re into tinkering with the code you can join their team and make the service even better.

A micro-donation service that makes it simple to “tip” your favourite artists made a lot of sense to us so connecting Libre.fm with Flattr was a no brainer. Artists can associate their Flattr and Libre accounts, and after that Flattr show up on their profile pages on an the page of an individual song.

List of few of their artists you might enjoy:

paniq is a German band that’s been making remarkable electronica since 1998. They are already successfully receiving support for their music, videos and other projects like the album. Recommend you switch this video to HD.

Antichrisis has been labeled a lot of things, among them are metal and folk pop. They’ve released a number of professional albums since the late 90s and have since been releasing Creative Commons licensed music through their own website.

Shine by Antichrisis

If paniq got you in the mood for more electronica you’ve got some with Melt Pax. He describe himself as a “digital enthusiast with analogue pretension”.

If you’re curious about what kind of music Matt Lee, the founder of Libre.fm, makes I’d recommend you listening to furny which is his own project, featuring electronic music as well.

For a dash of software themed folk music check out Draketo.

Libre.fm also has their own podcast which is a monthly show (listen to the September editionsupport Libre.fm, the project itself.