Parents hounding you for a holiday wish-list? Unsure what to buy for your friends?

Gift-giving has gotten harder since the Recording Industry Association of America came to town. The cartel of the biggest record labels has made a name for itself by suing families for downloading music, lobbying for massive expansions in copyright control, and including nasty DRM that limits fair use rights on their CDs. It's hard to support an industry which treats its customers like that!

Still, you believe in playing by the rules: file-sharing has legitimate purposes, but you're not just going to download a bunch of copyrighted songs without the artists' permission and then give that as a gift. What's a music-lover to do?

Luckily, not all record labels are members of the RIAA. A proud handful hold out, refusing to join in the cartel's backwards way of doing business. Sites like riaaradar.com help you sort the wheat from the chaff.

The kids at FreeCulture.org have compiled these holiday gift guides to start you off. Each guide is a list of 10 great RIAA-free CDs. There's something for every taste, and you can find many of them in your local record store or online.

• Gavin's list (indie pop/rock, electronic) - PDF
• Karen's list (indie, blues, random) - PDF (soon)
• Dan's list (well, duh, it's indie)
• Jordan's list (1990s mainstream artists who moved to indie labels)
• Eric's list (thrash, crust, grind, hardcore)
• Jason's list (indie?)

Extra credit: Creative Commons

There's lots of great Creative Commons-licensed music, too! Magnatune and Fading Ways are two good places to start.

RIAA-free CDs is brought to you by FreeCulture.org, home of the student movement for free culture.

For more non-RIAA CDs, visit riaaradar.com.

Note: The CDs on these lists were released on record labels that are not RIAA members. The artists may have released other CDs on RIAA labels; in some cases, the same CD may have been re-released on by an RIAA member. Furthermore, some independent labels use RIAA distributors.

These holiday gift guides are meant to be practical, not puritanical. But by focusing your purchasing power on non-RIAA members, you can weaken the RIAA and encourage other companies to stop doing business with them unless they change their ways.

Snowmen photo by Flickr user sister72, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.