Download Music - The Legal Way

I love music, all kinds of music. I listen to it everywhere: the car, at home, while working and as I’m exercising. Whenever I leave the house, I even make sure I have music playing for my spoiled parrot, Duncan. He apparently likes listening to music too as he whistles along with the tunes.

I promise I’m not crazy, even though I’ve filled up all three of my iPods with music! My entire CD collection has been transferred onto my iPods and Apple’s iTunes music store has made a small fortune off me, charging $0.99 for each song I’ve legally downloaded.

The iTunes Music Store is the biggest and most successful music download service, selling over 400 million songs since its start. In an attempt to combat Apple’s hold on the online music market, Yahoo! Music Unlimited (http://music.yahoo.com) began offering single song downloads at $0.79 each. In addition, users have the option to subscribe for unlimited downloads at $6.99 a month (or $59.88 if you pay for the entire year in advance). Over one million songs are available. You can play your Yahoo! songs on just about any digital music player; however it’s not yet compatible with Macintosh. In addition, the Yahoo! service offers streaming music video viewing. This is especially good if you don’t have time to sit in front of the television all day and watch MTV.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited is also competing against Napster (www.napster.com) and Rhapsody (www.rhapsody.com). Napster charges $14.95 a month for its unlimited subscription, or $0.99 a song. Rhapsody is $14.99 a month or $0.89 per song.

All four of the above mentioned services also offer commercial-free radio stations. Since I’m a huge iPod fan, I’ll stick with iTunes, even though I have to pay $0.20 more per song.