The Burnout racing series has evolved over the years, and it's quite fun playing through the 5 main games (Burnout, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, Burnout 3: Takedown, Burnout Revenge, Burnout Paradise) and seeing them evolve from intense arcade racing to awesome road-rage carnage. Unfortunately, one thing that was lost over the years was the original, quality music.

You see, the first two games had their own original soundtracks, and it complimented the two games immensely. Stephen Root and Steve Emney composed the music, and they did a good job. The music was awesome, and it made the game better(the music was never officially released, but fortunately the soundtracks have been ripped and are on the Internet).

Then Acclaim, their main publisher up to Burnout 2, went bankrupt. Fortunately, Criterion found Electronic Arts, and the Burnout series was saved, albeit taken in a different direction. Not a wholly bad direction (change is good), but one thing that was lost was the original music. EA decided to replace it with EA Trax, which was basically a bunch of punk rock music. They also added a DJ from the Los Angeles area to add commentary, which didn't go over well at all with Burnout fans. The two composers had composed some music for the game already, and it was thrown out just like that, not to be released in a Burnout game until Burnout Paradise. Admittedly the new music wasn't really horrible, and some of the songs kind of grew on me, but that doesn't change the fact that EA eschewed the original soundtrack.

Burnout Revenge, the 4th game in the series, had EA Trax as well. It wasn't as bad as Burnout 3; there was some kickass techno in the Trax that kind of fit Revenge. Burnout Paradise, a major step in the Burnout franchise, had some more bad Trax (AVRIL LAVIGNE AAAAAH) but it also had the original music from Burnout 1, 2, and the composed music from 3 (albeit renamed and remastered) which meant sweet relief for the people who liked and remembered the original music.

In summary: The Burnout music composed by Stephen Root and Steve Emney is awesome and it made the games better. The music is a bit obscure from what i've heard, and I don't want to see it left in the dust. To that end, i've linked downloads for the original three soundtracks right here. I'm not going to link the remixed music from Burnout Paradise, because while the remixes are awesome, they are also more readily available in other places (I think there's a detailed list on Burnopedia and a torrent on The Pirate Bay with them).

Burnout 1 OST: http://tinyurl.com/8unlb3
Burnout 2 OST: http://www.mediafire.com/?hoba0z9awappc4o
Burnout 3 composed music: http://www.mediafire.com/?7mkuwdd4kx5giw1 (I uploaded this one myself!)

If you can't download these files for whatever reason, i'm sorry. Maybe you can listen to the music on YouTube or something; the individual songs are easy to find but the complete OSTs are hard to track down.

Edited the Burnout 2 link on April 12th, 2013 (no torrenting needed now).

Sort of like the Wipeout series on PS1. The first game had almost exclusively composed music, but with each sequel they utilized more and more licensed tracks. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing since hearing Prodigy's Firestarter while playing Wipeout is awesome, but yeah. It did sort of bury the original soundtrack a bit.

Certainly has a lot in common with Burnout, doesn't it?

Edited the Burnout 2 link.