downloading music: somewhere safe and reliable?

[Mental Octopus]

i used to have kazaa (and kazaa lite) but it screwed up my computer wayyyyy to much. it brought all that spyware and adware junk and tons of viruses and no matter what i did to try and solve them nothing worked completely.

im not really well informed with any of the newer downloading services so i was wondering if someone can enlighten me. i hear good things about iTunes (i have an ipod and i also hear it works well for it?), morpheus and winmx. im kind of hestitant to try any of these because im worried it would screw up my computer....so i figured that i would ask real people instead of trusting any ads. if theres any others let me know.

if any of the "free" sites arent really 100% safe you can mention a few of the ones that cost money....how much would they cost? do they charge by the song or membership or what?

thanks your help is appreciated

[Wrong Robot]

iTunes is *by far* the most popular legal music download store. It has something like 70% of the market and they have sold over 100,000,000 songs.

Seeing as how you already have an iPod, that's the logical choice, since the iPod doesn't play .wma format, and all the other Legal music download sites only serve .wma(except for a couple of them that have .wma and .mp4)

Additionally iTunes has the biggest library, with over 800,000 songs. And they add about a thousand a week(average, some weeks are way more, it's usually not much less)

I've never had *any* problems with the iTMS, I've purchased dozens of albums from it in the past year, I couldn't be happier, saved a ton of money compared to if I were to have bought all of them on CD, some of them are hard to find anyway.(Like Michael Manring's The book of Flame)

it's pretty awesome, the base cost is $.99 per song, and $9.99 per album, but this is pretty flexible. Many many albums are cheaper than $9.99 and many of them are more expensive, kind of depends on your tastes I guess, usually the most popular stuff is a little more expensive, and it's usually the record companies push.

The other popular option, is rhapsody, which does a subscription service that gives you "all you can eat" access to about 500,000 songs, I think it's $10/month. that's pretty groovy too, but once you stop subscribing you are no longer able to listen to the songs you've downloaded, so that's lame.

[DigMe]

Originally Posted by Wrong Robot

The other popular option, is rhapsody, which does a subscription service that gives you "all you can eat" access to about 500,000 songs, I think it's $10/month. that's pretty groovy too, but once you stop subscribing you are no longer able to listen to the songs you've downloaded, so that's lame.

Actually Rhapsody has it's upsides. You can stream all the free music you want any time you want but you can also burn songs too just like iTunes. It's 79 cents per song. I guess it's cheaper since you're also paying a subscriber fee.

brad cook

[Wrong Robot]

Originally Posted by DigMe

Actually Rhapsody has it's upsides. You can stream all the free music you want any time you want but you can also burn songs too just like iTunes. It's 79 cents per song. I guess it's cheaper since you're also paying a subscriber fee.

brad cook

interesting, One could get *a lot* of free music with something like audio hijack and those free streams.


The *real* interesting thing about this legal downloading game is that Apple doesn't make any money off of iTunes, what they DO with it is use it as a means to sell more iPods which in turn bring in the $$$

Yes, Apple makes some money, but it all goes to servers and bandwidth, staff, advertising..etc. they don't actually cut a profit though.

The interesting thing here, is that not every music service has a corresponding iPod type deal, so they are just not making money, or losing money, and they can't jack prices since Apple already set the precedent, and that'd be suicide.

[DigMe]

It just got a little more interesting too:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...d=562&ncid=716

Real's service is Rhapsody for those who don't know.

I believe Apple isn't making a profit on iTunes because it just started and new businesses don't make profits for a while. It was years before any online business actually started making a profit...I believe Ebay was first. It took Amazon a REALLY long time.

WR - If that is true that iTunes isn't really for profit but just to sell more iPods...it seems like they'd WANT to work with Rhapsody on getting their songs working with the iPod. Going by the above article it seems like it's the other way around....as in they are trying to use the iPod to make more money from iTunes.

brad cook

[i like tictacs]

http://bt.etree.org

[Wrong Robot]

Originally Posted by DigMe

It just got a little more interesting too:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...d=562&ncid=716

Real's service is Rhapsody for those who don't know.

I believe Apple isn't making a profit on iTunes because it just started and new businesses don't make profits for a while. It was years before any online business actually started making a profit...I believe Ebay was first. It took Amazon a REALLY long time.

That's true, I'm sure they will cut a profit eventually a, but when you consider that for every song sold Apple only gets something like 11 cents(might even be less), and that has to goto bandwidth, servers, staff and other logistics, it's probably going to be quite a long while before they start turning a profit, and it may very likely be from some addition to the store.

WR - If that is true that iTunes isn't really for profit but just to sell more iPods...it seems like they'd WANT to work with Rhapsody on getting their songs working with the iPod. Going by the above article it seems like it's the other way around....as in they are trying to use the iPod to make more money from iTunes.

brad cook

That's the weird thing, Steve jobs and many of his underlings have said that the iTMS is all about selling iPods, yet, they don't seem to open to the idea of other stores promoting the iPod. something of a double standard, but I guess they just don't want other stores to get popular, they have a *firm* grip on the market, and that won't be changing any time soon, so they have the position to scoff at the others.

The dumb thing here, is that, that kind of attitude could be what gets apple fragged in this market, But only time will tell.

[LukeRazor]

I use soulseek http://www.slsknet.org/ no spyware/malware and a great selection of music, and much less smut too it seems (if you go downloading .exe file you can still get viruses though)

[Kelly Lee]

Originally Posted by Wrong Robot

The dumb thing here, is that, that kind of attitude could be what gets apple fragged in this market, But only time will tell.

It wouldn't be the first time they did it to themselves. I really don't understand the people at MAC/Apple

[robb.]

IBM still gets criticized for outsourcing their processors to intel and their operating system to microsoft. apple does the opposite and gets criticized for being to controlling.

emusic is my legal download service of choice. it's for music on independent labels, which is fine for me, since most of what i'm interested in is found there anyway.

robb.

[Josh Ryan]

Originally Posted by Wrong Robot

That's true, I'm sure they will cut a profit eventually a, but when you consider that for every song sold Apple only gets something like 11 cents(might even be less), and that has to goto bandwidth, servers, staff and other logistics, it's probably going to be quite a long while before they start turning a profit, and it may very likely be from some addition to the store.



That's the weird thing, Steve jobs and many of his underlings have said that the iTMS is all about selling iPods, yet, they don't seem to open to the idea of other stores promoting the iPod. something of a double standard, but I guess they just don't want other stores to get popular, they have a *firm* grip on the market, and that won't be changing any time soon, so they have the position to scoff at the others.

The dumb thing here, is that, that kind of attitude could be what gets apple fragged in this market, But only time will tell.

that's kind of S.O.P. for Apple, maybe this time it will work?

[Mental Octopus]

allright so i guess i will give iTunes a shot if theyre arent any good free ones. thanks for the info Wrong Robot.

[DigMe]

Originally Posted by Mental Octopus

allright so i guess i will give iTunes a shot if theyre arent any good free ones.

Good idea.

"free ones" is a misnomer anyway...like saying "Those cars over there are the 'free ones'...if you steal them."

brad cook

[Schwinn]

WinMx is great. I've used it for about a year and never had a problem. It's a bit slower than Kazaa Lite but the files are better quality I've found.