Streaming Music: Free Streaming Music Archives

International Folk Dance Archive
This collection, contains music for folk dancing that is now out of print. Most of the selections come from 78rpm transcriptions featuring music from all over the world. Metadata includes title, performing artist, country of origin, and duration.

 

National Jukebox by Library of Congress
The National Jukebox is a collection of historical sound recordings presented by the Library of Congress. The collection features more than 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1900 and 1925. New recordings are added periodically. The site also features selected playlists for listening.

 

British Library Archival Sound Recordings
British Library Sounds contains 50,000 sound recordings from all over the world. The collection is sorted into nine categories: Accents & Dialects; Arts, Literature & Performance; Classical Music; Environment & Nature; Popular Music; Oral History; Sound Recording History; World & Traditional Music; and Sound Maps. The site also includes audio download tools, a sound and vision blog, and a case studies page with written and video testimonials.

 

Global Music Archive
The Global Music Archive, by Vanderbilt University, is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas. It is a public facility that promotes education in African and American traditional and popular music through its own activities and its support for the activities of others.

 

Audio Archive
The recordings in this collection range from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by Internet Archive users. The collection features over 2.8 million recordings. The archive allows searching by topic or keyword search.

 

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1959, provides this free Listening Library. Enjoy performances of more than 250 classical music compositions written from 1691 to 2011. Search by title, composer, conductor or musician, or browse by countries, genre, composer and more. 

 

New Orleans Independent Music Digital Collection
Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University presents their digital collection of independently released albums. The purpose of the digital collection is to expose visitors to local indie music, to learn more about various indie bands and individual artists, that adds to the rich musical heritage of New Orleans.