I’m looking to pay no more than $1 or $1.50 a song. I don’t own an iPod, and don’t intend to, so iTunes is out. I’m not even sure where to begin, but I would like to be able to just download whatever song I want, stick it on my hard drive, and copy it to my generic mp3 player at will, without hassling with propriety software. Any suggestions.
The two I’ve used are www.emusic.com and www.allofmp3.com.
There is also a place called www.charitytunes.com which donate some of the sales to charity (of course I bias of this site because some of my music is on it). They’re a startup and don’t have all contracts in place at the moment. But there is some stuff there now.
eMusic is great because it has MP3s without DRM, but not so great because it doesn’t have a huge selection of mainstream stuff.
Apparently, Winamp is still offering a deal where if you download it – even the free version – you get to pick 50 free songs off eMusic. I took that deal. 50 songs turned out to be plenty, at least for me. By the end of the trial, I was having to having to search fairly hard for songs I wanted that were actually offered by the site.
Note that the legality of allofmp3.com is in dispute, as it appears to be a front for the Russian mafia…
yahoo music is $.79 per song but they download in .wma instead of .mp3 (if that makes a difference to you)
Yeah, eMusic may or may not be good depending on what you want.
They don’t charge per download, you instead pay a certain amount of money each month for a certain number of downloads.
The cheapest is $10 a month for 30 songs a month, which I guess is about 33 cents per song. You can see the subscription plans here. I think they also offer annual plans, but they’re not right there.
When I signed up it was for 90 downloads a month for a year, with a free 1 gig Creative Zen Nano Plus. I don’t know if they still offer that deal.
I haven’t downloaded anything for a while from it… and that really sucks because I just found out that the downloads don’t roll over from month to month: you have to use them each month.
As Snooooopy said, the music is in mp3 files, without any DRM crap. Plus, if you want to redownload a song you’ve already bought, you don’t have to pay again.
As far as the selection goes, it’s mostly geared toward indie stuff, but they have lots of other good things too. I downloaded an album from The Carter Family from them. They also have classical music. You can search on their site for the music they offer without signing up. But it’s true that there is also a lot of stuff they don’t have that iTunes does.
The wikipedia page has some interesting stuff about their business model and selection.
Emphasis mine.
Apart from the already mentioned allofmp3 (which is of questionable legality), no such service exists that I know of. Any other place that will actually give you mp3s has a very limited catalog, and any place with a sizeable catalog slaps DRM on the music.
Clarification: it’s in dispute for everyone outside of Russia. If you use their service while in Russia, it’s legal but the morality is in dispute…
If you’re looking for all of your favorite music in legal DRM-less mp3 format, it looks like you’re out of luck. And, as mentioned by other posters, calling the legality of AllOfMp3 questionable is a bit of an understatement.
That said, if you’re willing to consider some much lesser-known bands, there are a wealth of options available. One of my favorites is www.amiestreet.com. It’s been covered a few times at TechCrunch.
The idea is that every song is in a DRM-less mp3. Also, every song starts out free. As more people download it and rate it, the price grows–but never to more than 98 cents, and most songs are in the 10 to 20 cent range. Users can “rec” songs, and if the price (and popularity) of the song grows after that, that user will get half of the price increase added to their account to spend on other songs. It really is an interesting model, and seems (reasonably) good at separating the good stuff from the bad.
If you’ve got a bit of time and some interest, it can be a rewarding experience.
I don’t know if they are any better legally, but they don’t have the attention of allofmp3, but I use mp3sugar.com, which has an extensive, but not AS extensive, library.
I doubt it. Any MP3 download service based in Russia is automatically suspect.
What about Napster? Thats who I generally use, more for the selection than the price though.
-XT
So, what about Yahoo Music and Napster? Can anyone comment on their selection, price, or DRM, if any?
I use Yahoo. Selection is pretty good, price is 79 cents per song, with Windows Media DRM. Tracks are 192 kbps WMA.
I’ve used Napster and Yahoo!. I prefer the Napster client to the Yahoo! client, whcih seems to really kludge up my system for some reason.
How does Windows Media DRM work? Only Windows Media Player will play the song? Or will it play in any device that can play .wma files?