I worked on the FMA back in the early days when it was still run out of the WFMU office.

There's some really killer stuff buried in there alongside some solid netlabel output from the teens. It was very actively curated in the beginning but it quickly became hard to find the good stuff and after a couple years of emphasis on promoting royalty-free music for film it kind of drifted away from its original mantra of "It's not just free music; it's good music".

Honestly kind of bummed with where the project landed, presumably sold for peanuts to a for-profit so they can use it for lead gen.

I run a soundscape/white noise website (https://ambiph.one) and used FMA to find some really great music for the radio stations, though I did have to do a lot of virtual crate-digging to find it - I found the discovery features very limited.

I had a bit more luck on Bandcamp, which lets artists use Creative Commons licences but strangely doesn't surface that at all as a search filter. I had to resort to searching for "some rights reserved" via Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Abandcamp.com+lofi+%2...

I was the lead software engineer on this project when it was conceived, designed, and built. The people at WFMU were so great to work with and absolutely dedicated to getting it right.

I don't know much about its current incantation, but I appreciate that the owning company kept the original "About" page with my name and the team I worked with to make it happen.

It's one of the projects I'm most proud of. Also, sadly (in a personal legacy sense), one of the few projects I've worked on in the past quarter century that is still standing.

Some months ago I gathered a sizable, mighty fine offline music collection from https://netlabels.org/electronic-music/ and https://files.scene.org/browse/music/ — plenty of "duds" in both too, but that's just called subjective taste preferences and personal collection curation =)

In the past, I used this one too: https://musopen.org/

They got some rockin' tunes there. +1

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Seawolf/Seawolf__Sex_Demo...

Another great resource is the ODGProd catalog. As I gather, everything they publish is free to download for personal consumption. It's a specific niche of music, so you won't just find anything on there, but if someone likes modern dub, reggae and closely related genres, they can be a goldmine. While the tunes are downloadable, they also publish on major music streaming sites too, and have a live stream on YouTube as well, so it's easy to get into.

Great website. I discovered a lot of incredible artists and since they have generous creative commons licences, I was able to use them in some games I made. Finding music that ties the experience together is really satisfying.

Is this in any way connected to the archive.org netlabel branch?

It's good to see this! All CC-BY-NC, apparently. Is there a bulk download?