DodgingCars

I'm not an audiophile, so you may not trust my word, but I always thought they sounded fine.

I did E-music for 3 months. I basically downloaded about 150 albums in that time and then I ran out of stuff to download (to make the $10-15/mo worth it). They are slow in getting new stuff -- i.e. they have a deal with a label, a new album comes out on the label and you may not see it for awhile.

It was well worth my money ($45) to have over 1000 legal mp3s.

I was looking elsewhere, because I wanted more variety, particularly some major label stuff.

I've settled with Rhapsody, which for $10/mo I can stream unlimited amounts of music -- and they have something like 30,000 albums available. I was able to stream The Strokes new album on release day. That's nice! And well worth the $10/mo. I use it at work where I just stream music all day. The sound quality is nice (IMO).

If I were to purchase tracks/abums though, I'd go with Itunes. They are more flexible (it seems) with their usage/burning rights.

FrozenMetalHead

Does anyone know if there's a website that reviews / monitors these sites? My biggest problem is I can never find every artists or song that I want to download, and so you have to go to several places to find them all (which of course you usually can't anyways). I'd love to have a site where you could type in the artist name and it shows you which sites carried that artist.

GeoffK

Napster 2.0

Has 50,000 tracks
Free 30 second previews
$9.95 for unlimited streaming ad dowloading to your PC
$0.99c per song and $9.95 per album to burn to CD or transfer to MP3 Payer
Use secure Windows Media

Streaming is max a 90kbps (which is OK but not great)
Downloaded tracks play at 128kbps (which is good but could be better).

I'm trying it out for this month, and it's been nice to check out some albums I've been considering buying. So far the selection is pretty good.

Sloth911

Can you please clarify this... i was reading the TOS on napster.com

Is there 2 options:

Option A: $9.95 for unlimited streaming ad dowloading to your PC

or

Option B: $0.99 per song and $9.95 per album to burn to CD or
transfer to MP3 Payer

or

Just one option:

$9.95 for unlimited streaming ad dowloading to your PC
$0.99c per song and $9.95 per album to burn to CD or transfer to MP3 Payer

-----------

did that make sense?

eeyoreed

iTunes Music Store for Mac AND Windows.

Best pay site out there in terms of selection, management rights, and price.

Now that it's available for Windows, why would you ever choose anything else?

The best part? No subscription fees!

Enjoy!

-eeyoreed

Shay

hmm, itunes is fine if you only want to use apple products. The songs are drm aac which only play in itunes or an ipod. If you want to use anything else, you would have to burn it cd and rip the song. I would be unable to use my audiotron or creative nomad if I were to go the itunes route.

DodgingCars

That's why I use both. IMO, Rhapsody is the best if you're just interested in hearing new music. $10/mo to stream unlimited music. Tens of thousands of albums with new ones added every day. The streaming is very good quality (not sure what the actual quality is, but it sounds good). It's easy to make playlists and you can even email your playlists to other people. Their radio stations are top notch -- AND you can skip songs in the radio mode. You can also make custom radio station by giving it 10 band names and then it plays music by and similar to those artists.

Rhapsody will also work with a device that lets you send your Rhapsody music to your stereo.

The only thing bad about Rhapsody? No downloading. You can burn a track for $0.79 each, but you can't actually download tracks.

But if I want to download tracks I use ITunes. I liked it much better than the new Napster.

DodgingCars

That's true. I don't have a portable device though, so it doesn't effect me.

Hopefully they'll let you convert protected files later (you can convert unprotected files now).

Edited to add: AAC plays in Quicktime and RealOne.

Shay

But songs bought from itunes are drm aac, which only works in the above mentioned itunes or ipod. From what I heard aac is a great format, but apple is not letting anyone use or license their drm.

DodgingCars

WASHINGTON : Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, is jumping into the online music game with a trial launch of a service offering downloads at 88 cents a song.

The Wal-Mart service would be below the average price of 99 cents a song offered by other services launched in the past few months, including those by Apple Computer and the new Napster service.

"We've found that easy access to a wide range of music is very important to the Wal-Mart customer," said Kevin Swint, Walmart.com's senior category manager of entertainment media in a statement Thursday.

"With 64 percent of our customers online, we see digital music downloads as a natural extension of the music selection offered in Wal-Mart stores. We're excited to offer this convenient service at the value and selection our customers expect from Wal-Mart."

The testing phase began this week and, based on customer response, will be officially rolled out early next year, Wal-Mart said.

The company said its service would offer some 200,000 songs from all categories except classical.

Wal-Mart is the latest to jump into legal music downloads in the wake of music industry efforts to crack down on authorized free swapping of songs.

Customers will be able to play downloaded music in the WMA format on their Windows PC, burn songs to a CD, or transfer music to portable devices.


Here's the link to their page:
http://musicdownloads.walmart.com/ca...et/MainServlet

kilcher

Are the songs going to be censored like the cd's they sell?

big whoppa

WMA format will limit usage. Frankly, itunes and the rest could make money on 50 cents a download.

MJKTool

Is there anything walmart doesnt sell?

Cardiff Giant11

yeah: class

PhYbEr

[rant] exactly.. WMA stinks.. If your car player won't play WMA, only MP3 then you are out of luck and would have to burn an audio cd.. what good is that? So basically we are paying 9.99 for a cd that the music industry doesn't even have to MAKE any more? We download it, burn it, and then must own it forever since they say you can't sell the WMA file... sheesh.. [/rant]

C_Fletch

"Are the songs going to be censored like the cd's they sell?"

Exactly. I wouldn't waste my money(.88) on any music from Walmart - they are by far the worst offenders when it comes to censorship.

DodgingCars

Personally, I think this is good news. They are offering music downloads at a cheaper price... Even if you decide not to use them, hopefully it will influence a price drop by other providers.

As for the censorship... anything that's censored should be listed as such:

FrozenMetalHead

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...media_janus_dc

Long article, but the jist of the story is that MicroSoft's new software Janus will allow online subscription services (i.e. Napster or MusicNet where you can pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to stream or download non-burnable music, as opposed to iTunes where you download and purchase an individual track) to securely let subscribers transfer music to their mp3 players.

Monthly prices for the subscription services are expected to be more than the now-standard $9.95, but probably near the $20 mark.

The article says that music players by Creative, Rio, Dell, and iRiver will produce players that can work with the new software(don't know if that means exisiting models can be upgraded).

While I'll hold my judgement on this until it comes out, I am much more intrigued by this than the exisitng subscription model.

bdrules

This is great. Having to pay .99 to transfer a song onto my mp3 player as insane and is what kept me from signing up for these services (other than emusic). I'd have no problem paying $10-15 a month for this. $20 might be pushing it as I'm only really "renting" the music. Oh, and I use an ipod, which is sort of a problem.

Jack Straw

I just checked out Rhapsody and think that I will stick with it for a few months. I'll use it as a springboard to make decisions on what CD's I'll eventually go out and buy. I may cherry-pick a few songs and burn them to CD if I find that I won't want the entire CD. However, I am partial to going and getting the CD itself for sound quality concerns, and having the liner notes, etc. Thanks to the above posters for giving me some helpful information about some of the available music d/l websites out there.