Buying Music Online

• AllOfMp3
  Allofmp3 is one of the cheapest ways of legally downloading music. Charging by the megabyte, at only around $.02 per meg, you can download a full album in the format and quality of your choice, for not much more than one dollar. They also provide some custom "explorer" software which makes browsing the store, listening to previews, and downloading songs a snap.
  

• Bleep
  Bleep offers a catalog of completely legal mp3 music for download. While they don't have the popular bands from the major record labels, they do have quite an extensive assortment of good music, although a bit pricey at around $1.35 per track. Unlike iTunes and other North-American based music stores though, the songs are free of Digital Rights Management restrictions.
  

• iTunes
  "Select from more than one million tracks from all four major and more than 600 leading independent labels. Enjoy free 30-second previews of all songs. Find hundreds of exclusive and pre-release tracks and many rare, out-of-print albums."

  $.99 a song for completely legal music downloads and a huge library to choose from. The only problem is the file format is not mp3, so the only hardware player supported is iPod.
  

• MP3-Search
  MP3-Search, another Russian music download site, offers mp3-encoded songs for only $.10 each. Because it's in Russia, the site operates under different music distribution laws than in the United States, allowing them to sell any music, and paying a license fee to a governing music distribution organization which then theoretically pays the artists.
  

• MP3tunes
  Brand new, MP3tunes.com is a music store offering DMR-free mp3-format music for 88 cents a song.
  

• Napster
  This is not your father's Napster. Completely unrelated to the P2P file-sharing napster of days gone by, Napster is now a completely legal music service that gives you on-demand access to over a million songs for low flat-rate monthly fee. Beware though, you can only access the music you've downloaded for as long as you're a Napster member. And if you want to burn music to a CD, it'll cost you $.99 a track.
  

Anything we're missing? Let us know.

Talk about this topic in the discussion forums.