Thanks to several converging factors—the elevated profile of the rap mix-tape format, the decreasing cost of digital recording, the Internet—it’s become common for musicians to not even bother charging money for their albums. In fact you could probably keep up a pretty solid rotation of new music and not spend a cent, even without touching the untold gigabytes of material illicitly uploaded to Mediafire. After the jump I share some of my favorite free albums of 2011.