Creative Commons is a non profit organization that offers a variety of licenses with “some rights reserved”. Basically is is built to allow artists to legally share their work without losing copyright protection over it.

There’s a lot of great music out there licensed under one of the CC licenses, and even entire record labels built on the concept.

Soundclick has a list of songs that have been released under a cc license, dmusic offers Creative Commons licenses for artists hosting their music, and opsound.com is an interesting place to submit your own cc licensed music.

There are entire “albums” that have been released under a cc license such as Frame Independent, Loved Like a Milkshake - A Tribute to Wesley Willis, People Like Us and Kenny G, Subatomicglue, and the Wired CD.

Artists like The Phoenix Trap, Erik Ostrom, Black Ink, Scott Andrew, and Horton’s Choice have released some of their music under a cc license.