Online Music Stores Compared

prostoalex writes "DesignTechnica has a comparison of the leading online music stores. With the variety of services available they only concentrated on several top ones. Conclusion? 'If you simply want to download music from the charts, then Yahoo and Wal-Mart are your cheapest options. For your MP3 player, there are several options, with Yahoo the best of all. If you're an iPod owner... then you're stuck with iTunes.'"

Comments

I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you're an iPod owner... then you're stuck with iTunes."

That's bullshit. I have an iPod, and only a tiny fraction of my music has come from iTunes. I would think by now that everyone would be aware that the iPod is very capable of playing mp3s, regardless of where you got them from.

Contradictory and wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The review contradicts itself and contains factual errors.

eMusic allows MP3 downloads but iPod owners have to use iTunes?
No. You can use eMusic downloads on your iPod too.

iTunes downloads with fairplay are only playable in iTunes and on iPods?
No. iTunes downloads with fairplay are playable in any application that supports QuickTime. There's a very simple api for extracting the decompressed audio data from those files. The user must authenticate with the music store before the files can be decrypted, but that's it.

The best music store

[xtracto]

For long, the best music store for me has been AllOfMp3

I can buy lossless formated music, ogg or even raw .WAV music, unencumbered by DRM, quite cheap and easly. (Oh and they have a damn lot of music).

And also, there are a number of different ways to pay (in case you do not trust Russian stores):
-Credit Card
-Pay Pal
-Xrost
-Bank Transfer
-WebMoney

Cool uh?

Why?

[tktk]

Apple's iTunes is one of the best and also the most frustrating services.

I don't understand the frustrating part. The author tries to make an issue of having to convert iTunes songs into mp3 or WMA. But why would you want to? iTunes also plays songs bought from the iTunes Music store.

The only possible reason to do the unweildy conversion is to get rid of DRM. But the author is willing to accept DRM from other stores and, IMO, worse conditions:

Napster You don't own the music, however, and if you cancel your subscription, all the tracks you've downloaded disappear.

Looks like once you start with Napster, you're also stuck with Napster.

Yahoo However, as with other subscription services, you only have access to the music as long as you maintain your subscription.

Same with Yahoo.

...(full disclosure: I write reviews for eMusic)....

Maybe the full disclosure should be placed at the beginning of the article?

...And of course it's not even *true*.

[@madeus]

The most annoying thing I find is that it's not even true.

iTunes of course is software that Apple provide that allows you to upload to your iPod (the sort of software you'd expect any MP3 player vendor to provide with their hardware), and there are 3rd party utilities - both commercial and free - that also offer this functionality.

This is distinct from the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) which was added after iTunes and iPod's had already been available for some time, but is a feature of the software (for logical reasons, as it would be much less user friendly if it had a completely separate application window).

You can of course use music from stores with the iPod. I buy from the iTMS, but I also buy MP3's from the outstanding Emusic all the time (I like the service as you get plain MP3's so there is no messing about with keys or authorisation, and you can entire albums as single .zip archives and you can re-download stuff as much as you like if you have an active subscription, the only thing I don't like about it is the 'subscription' model rather than the more traditional pay-per-song model).

The 'problem' is that the iTunes Music Store only supports iTunes, which only (officially) supports the iPod (though unoffically it's possible to use it with a number of devices using 3rd party plug-ins), NOT that the iPod is somehow 'locked in' to the iTMS, which it isn't.

This is a premise that a 10 year old should be able to grasp, but is apparently way above the heads of Chris Nickson, the editors at Designtechnica, ScuttleMonkey and prostoalex.

Re:Stuck, huh?

[JayAndSilentBob]

According to this article http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm AllOfMP3 is operating legallly in Russia. Near the bottom of the page, it says Moscow police investigated them, and prosecutirs found nothing wrong.