http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22676/how-do-i-download-a-file-over-http-using-python import urllib response = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3') mp3 = response.read() Will work fine. Or, if you don't want to deal with the "response" object you can call read() directly:import urllib mp3 = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/sound.mp3').read()