LIVING OFF DIVIDENDS & PASSIVE INCOME

Slacker
Offers free streaming music to your desktop or hand-held slacker device. Quite a large of music and no annoying ads interspersed between tracks unlike Yahoo!’s Launch player. You can also add your favorite artists to your station and customize to your tastes.

Spiralfrog.com
Spiralfrog offers free music downloads from a large library, in exchange for clicking through a certain number of ads per month.

Amie Street
Offers music downloads with a very innovative fee structure – tracks start out free, and the price scales with the number of people who download them, capped at 98 cents. There is even the possibility of making money – if you recommend a track before it rockets up in price, you are rewarded with store credit. Has a large and growing selection, including the Barenaked Ladies, Tiesto, Jonathon Coulton, etc. Also recently announced a large amount of funding from Amazon.

Lala.com
Lala.com launched in June 2006 as a membership service that facilitated CD swaps. The site lets music fans list the CDs they own and the CDs they want, and then it arranges trades. Each transaction costs $1.75, which pays for a nifty Netflix-like envelope, 75 cents in shipping, a roughly 20-cent honorarium deposited into a trust fund for artists, and, of course, a fee for the middleman. Lala.com’s founder, Bill Nguyen says a portion of this fee goes to the performers. This may also temporary assuage the suit-happy RIAA. The arrangement exploits a loophole in copyright law: While distributing duplicates is verboten, it’s perfectly legal to trade your own property. (And there’s nothing to prevent Lala users from ripping a copy of a disc before they send the original off to someone else.) In February 2007, Lala added CD sales to its offerings.

Starting in November, Lala will offer unlimited on-demand streams of music from two of the four major labels (the company’s still negotiating with the other two) using the internet radio station that Lala.com owns, WOXY. Users can immediately buy any track they hear on WOXY.

Last.fm
Last.fm is a social music site that allows users to subscribe to radio stations based on their tastes and favourite artists. It is possible to use the service from within popular music players on Windows, Linux or OS X, though it does rely on having a decent internet connection with no caps or limits. The range of music available is very good, and the intention behind the site is to expose listeners to stuff they may not have experienced. Major label artists are well represented, but it’s also pretty simple to add and tag your own content to the site if you’re a producer.
Deezer.com
A free radio site, with excellent selection.

If you’re okay with downloading music illegally, bittorrent and limewire are two popular peer-to-peer softwares that facilitate this. But be careful. The RIAA is cracking down heavily on music pirates. Or you can just buy your tracks from Amazon’s Music Store.

• Fancy Watches On The Cheap During the last stock market boom I had made a little bit of money. At that time I had often contemplated buying an expensive watch but it seemed like such a waste of money and I put it off. Anyway the market crashed and so did my dreams of owing......
• A Better Way To Earn Money From Parked Domains Until recently, domainers used to park domains with nothing but ads on them. They tried to get traffic from mis-spelt URLs or people who'd directly type a URL in the location bar. There wasn't any content to attract the search engines, so unless they were paying to direct traffic to......
• Blogging Yourself To Financial Freedom Making Our Way has a great post on how people think they can start a personal finance blog and expect to make enough money out of it that they can quit their jobs! Unless you getting 50,000 hits a day, thats not going to work out for you. And unless......

• Organize Your Personal Finances in No Time by Debbie Stanley If nothing else, the state of the economy has shown that millions of people don’t have a good grasp of how to manage their personal finances. There are hundreds of books written every year on the subject and yet, this concept still seems to elude many. Some books are either......
• Top 14 Personal Finance Tools This is a guest post by Fred Schebesta who writes about saving money at Savings Account Finder. There he helps people compare and choose the right savings account to get more interest. Managing your finances can take a lot of time to be done right, however you financial security......
• PFBuzz - Discover And Vote For Your Favorite Personal Finance Sites. As if he has not been busy enough already - my friend and fellow M-Network member Pinyo over at Moolanomy has just unleashed his newest project, Personal Finance Buzz. PFBuzz acts like Digg, but it is only for personal finance related articles. Users can submit articles, vote all submissions either......

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