Anything with a copyright date of 1922 or earlier legally has no owner and is in the public domain. If you're a musician, cover that song. If you're a paid blogger, plaster that picture wherever you'd like in your work. For the most part, that is. This is something we bloggers have to work with here.
That being said, all sound recordings in the United States are said to be under copyright protection until February 15, 2067, small print aside. So, completely royalty-free music does not exist in the United States right now. Songs either have to be attributed and paid for, or just covered and properly distributed, etc.
If a song has a copyright date of before 1922, it can be covered then distributed at your own free will, but other recordings of the song cannot and must be licensed, as they are still under copyright law. This was decided as constitutional in the early 2000s, right as the Internet was being used by more people to share and develop creative works.
Creative Commons was developed around this time as an organization resolved to making more media available to be shared and developed. Music under a Creative Commons license can be more flexibly shared, or free with citation. Wikipedia functions under one of these licenses.
Since the Pazz and Jop polls were recently released, and for independent music worldwide and variety's sake, here are a few of the newest and most popular Creative Commons-licensed downloads via Bandcamp.
Roll the Bones, Shakey Graves This nice folk outfit hailing from Austin, Texas is one of this week's top sellers on Bandcamp. Their full album is streaming here.
How to Carve a Carrot Into a Rose, Courtney Barnett A stoned Camera Obscura-esque outfit, this won my own poll of Bandcamp's recent staff picks. Australian-born Courtney Barnett's record translates well as both ambience and music for silent driving.
Beacons, Cloudkicker This was released in 2010, but it has been posted on Bandcamp as one of the "most recommended" albums. Here we have an erratic instrumental download comparable to Link Wray's guitar fuzz, if he produced progressive metalscapes.
List continues on the next page.
