With Christmas nearly here and many people getting new potable music players as presents, I was wondering where everyone buys music from. If you own an iPod you probably have iTunes installed and might even be using it to buy music. I’ve bought music from iTunes and even though it’s priced well, many of the songs you purchase have DRM and can only be used on an iPod. We have several kinds of portable music players in my house, so it becomes hard to put music from the iTunes store onto some of these players. I’ve never tried the Zune music store, but I’ve heard it is almost as good as the iTunes store, but once again you are locked into DRM designed for the Zune music players. Recently I have been using Amazon to purchase music. What’s nice about the Amazon music store is that there is no DRM so you can use the music on any type of portable music player. Some songs are even cost less than the usual $0.99 price seen elsewhere. Amazon doesn’t offer a music player like the others, but they do have a downloader you can install and it will put the music you buy into your library and add it to iTunes or Windows Media Player for you automatically. There are other places around the web that sell music, but I’m not sure how reputable they are. There are also some places such as rhapsody that sell music subscriptions where you can have an unlimited number of songs for as long as you pay the subscription. Problem with the subscription idea is you don’t actually own any of the music and when you stop paying the monthly subscription you lose all the music you acquired through the service and lets face it with today economy who really needs another monthly bill?
