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Download Music! Legally And Free...
By Will from Holland
(Page 3 of 3)
3) Paid Download and Streams Sites
Napster
Remember them from the illegal downloads? They ‘bettered’ their life and now offer unlimited access to over a million legal songs.
After registration, downloading their music player, and paying ($9.99/month) you can listen to all the music you want, and even download this to your computer for offline use. However, if you want to burn the Napster songs to a CD, you’ll have to pay an additional $0.99 per song.
Little concerns arise looking at Napsters’ privacy policy. Napster has a detailed and clear privacy policy that spells out all the information they collect on you and the companies that they share it with. The clarity of the policy is good, but we’d caution you about the extent of the information they may share—it’s a lot.
MyMusicInc and iMusicSearch
These sites have been around for a little while now and offer a similar service to Napster. As a user you register with the company, download their player, and pay your fee (either monthly or lifetime fees available, respectively $0.99/month to $34.95) and you can download and listen to all the music you want. The big difference these services offer compared to Napster is that after paying your fee, you can burn all the music you want to CDs for free.
Sounds like a deal, right? But you must pay attention, since both services try to lure you in with ‘free’ stuff and then send you right to the “pay” stuff. As soon as you click on a ‘free’ link, they make you register and choose your payment type. They allow you to download the music player for free; any music must be paid for.
Both services have a reasonable privacy policies, claiming that they don’t share the private information you provide them at registration and before usage. Experience teaches us that this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, as companies can change their policy at any time, and most have proven to do so.
So what if you want to download and pay for popular music after all?
There are plenty of sites where you can comfortably download all the music you want for a little fee. For instance iTunes, MusicMatch and Rhapsody.
Most of you have probably heard of these services already, or are using them as you read. You register with the company, download the companies’ own music player, and voila, you can start looking at the music they offer.
All 3 of the services are paid services. Both iTunes and MusicMatch charge you $0.99 to download a song, while downloading most albums costs $9.99. Cool extra features from both iTunes and MusicMatch: they provide you with a lot of additional services. They offer radio stations you can listen to for free, free music videos, and sometimes even free sharing of music with your friends.
Rhapsody is a different service. After downloading their player and registering, they give you unlimited access to over a million songs for under $10 a month. This means you can listen to all the music they offer as a stream, but they have limited CD burning possibilities. Downloading songs to burn to a CD still costs an additional $0.99 per song. Also, Rhapsody also offers radio stations. Cool thing about the Rhapsody’s version is that they are customizable to your own preferences.
Looking at the privacy policies at all three services, we run across similarities to what we’ve seen already with most of the companies mentioned in this article. They collect your private information, put cookies on your machine and promise not to share your private information with anyone other than their affiliates. Again, they also say that their privacy policy is subject to changes at any time. There’s your clue.
That’s almost it for this review. There are plenty more sites and services if you search the Web for music. You have to be careful though. There’s a lot of illegal music downloading out there which can get you in a lot of trouble. There’s also a lot of collection of personal information on you that companies can share with other parties. Our recommendation is that you always read the privacy policy of any website or service. You’re not stupid, but skipping this safeguard is a stupid move.
Just last week I met a girl who got kicked out of school for downloading illegal music onto the school’s computer. And she was lucky not to get prosecuted.
The best reason to play it legal? Put yourself in a musician’s situation: If you write music for a living, would you want somebody to steal it?
Make sense? Read more about issues like this in our other articles and be sure to give us your feedback.
Cheers, Will
Continued
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