When EMI sued MP3.com founder Michael Roberston startup MP3Tunes complaining about it's music search engine Sideload that links to publicly available songs, they claimed that they never put music files online as free downloads. Therefore, according to EMI, all songs on Sideload are unauthorized and the site is promoting piracy.
To point out the absurdity of the claim (What label doesn't give away some music for promotional purposes?), Robertson asked the site's users to help find example of EMI songs available as promotional downloads online. A few months later, they've collected 1369.
EMI Still In Denial plus The List Of Free Songs
To be fair, Robertson's list has not been vetted by a third party, and it could include some songs not authorized by EMI. But most come from reputable blogs and sites who work hard to only offer legal downloads.
"This list is just a fraction of the songs EMI makes available, but it's irrefutable that EMI uses free song files as promotion," says Robertson. "Astonishingly they are still telling the court that they don't authorize song files to be distributed for free. They are denying these songs are legitimate in spite of overwhelming evidence of MP3 files from retailers, blogs, artist sites, label sites, and marketing sites. Even when you point to one of their own corporate blogs which offers downloads they remain steadfast in their claim that they don't distribute MP3s online for free... I think it's one of the first examples of crowd sourcing evidence."
Organized as a Google spreadsheet and complete with links, here is the list of EMI songs available as free downloads.
