It may be easier to find a needle in a haystack than to find a site which offers free music and videos on the web nowadays. Pay for download sites have at least made it more affordable for the music lover to get their hands on the latest and hottest hits off the web which they can use for personal purposes. MP3How.com is a portal which gives you access to music from several sites that are hailed to be the best on the net. They offer some of the lowest rates for people who love music and don’t want to spend a fortune doing so. This is the best option for music labels for DRM has proved to be quite ineffective even to control illegal/pirated music within their borders. Some sites have opted to give free downloads that have advertising included within the tracks as their major source of income. They can be accessed through a proprietary player which also acts as the download interface and conversion platform (for conversion into formats that the myriad of players support some of which have proprietary formats) for the downloaded tracks.
The next, most viable option for music labels is to sell music already in digital format that avoids piracy with included DRM solutions embedded. Major labels have done so through affiliation with music downloading sites in hopes of getting revenue from their music, making it so cheap that people would opt to buy the licensed songs rather than the pirated ones. Asia is still one of the most notorious regions on earth where piracy has become a source of livelihood for the many citizens of developing countries. China, Taiwan, and other countries in Asia have long been at war at these piracy rings but sometimes arrests and stopping one, results in several replacing them and the cycle goes on and on. The key would be to prevent the demand so as to affect the supply which is why sites like MP3How have started to offer membership for less than a dollar to access over 3 million strong collection of songs, videos and TV shows.