Library offers free MP3 downloads with Freegal tool

Commerce Township Community Library patrons are downloading music for free — and it’s all legal thanks to Freegal, a downloadable music service that offers hundreds of thousands of songs in over 100 genres of music.

Freegal is a service started by Library Ideas, the company that contracted with Sony to offer this service. It’s paid for by the library with Commerce Township property owners’ tax dollars. Therefore, its use is restricted to Commerce residents. All they need is a library card and to have their account in good standing in order to have access to the Sony Music Entertainment Catalog, which features thousands of artists and hundreds of thousands of songs which are updated daily and include new releases.

However, users are limited to three downloads per week so that a maximum number of patrons can have equal access to the songs in the Sony catalog. After Sundays at midnight, users can again download three songs for free.

The songs download to your computer as MP3 files. They can then be played on the computer, burned to a CD, or played on an MP3 player, such as an iPod or iPad.

For more information on this legal and virus-free way to get free music, visit the Commerce Township Community Library’s website at www.commercelibrary.info/freegal.