I am working on a list of sites that offer not only lossless downloads but are also drm free. The availability of legal lossless downloads has skyrocketed over the last 6 months across all genres of music which is a great sign for lossless audio. To tide you over until the list is completed you may want to check out Archive.org. Archive.org has a huge amount of free lossless audio downloads spanning all types of genres.
A good place to start is their Live Music Archive which features high quality lossless downloads of live concerts in both FLAC, Shorten as well as MP3. You can also stream many of there offerings but for our purpose we will focus on the lossless formats. The Live Music Archives missions statement is as follows.

“Welcome to the Live Music Archive. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists’ commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community.”

Another area to check out is the Grateful Dead section. If you have any interest in The Grateful Dead then this is an incredible place to start. They have a large collection of lossless audience recordings spanning many decades in both Flac and Shorten. When I first came across this site they also offered lossless soundboards and for any of you out there who enjoy The Dead you know what a big deal this was! Luckily I stocked up while these were available.
There are other places to check out at Archive.org like Open Source Audio and Spirituality & Religion and all of these areas have drm free lossless audio for you to sink your headphones into.
Another point worth noting is the interface for Archive.org. Navigation is very easy and contains a lot of useful sections for discovering new music. Features include various search engines, statistics such as top downloaded files and plenty of resources to get you up to speed on the various formats they offer.

If you decide that Archive.org is a useful project then you might want to think about donating. If you can’t already tell I really like this site, it has turned out to be what so many other sites have strived, claimed and pretended to be and all of it is supported by donations. Hope you enjoy it!

Check Out Archive.org

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