Mondak

Alright, Maybe I have extracted my pound of flesh from the music industry for ripping me off on all those CDs that were Eighteen bucks (jerks). I wish I could put them out of business for price fixing all those years, but what can I do.

Since it is increasingly difficult to steal music, I am going to have to start to try and pay for it again. The thing is that as far as I can tell, each service has little gottchas (here we go again....) that you have to deal with to use their service. The FAQ doesn't really tell you what they are and so I think you have to try the service before you know what they are. This means that my source of information is hearsay and really not that reliable at this point. For example, someone told me that itunes only let you download in their propriatary format that you can only play in their players. The format is called .cda or something. It also includes all sorts of spyware that tracks everythign you do with that file. I have no idea whether any of that is actually true.

I figured I would turn to my trusted friends at The TFP to help clear away the smoke. Please provide a review of the strenghts and weaknesses of the available download (pay) sites that are out there. Put your thoughts into catagories so that if one aspect is more important to someone than another, they may value that service higher. For example, I want a high quality MP3 file that I can use however I want. Someone else may prefer a cheaper price. The catagories I have come up with are

Technology - (What are the gotchas)

Price - (How much to DL, is there a subcription price, etc.)

Library - (How big is it? How extensive? Is it only recent pop or is it all older stuff, Etc.)

The services I know of are

Itunes
Musicmatch
Buymusic.com
Napster
Real

Feel free to add others.

Thanks a lot for the reviews and the effort