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Summary

BuyMusic.com is the first service I tried, first one out for "the rest of us." It has complex, varying restrictions on the music. But it also is web based, so it's a no install if you already have media player 9. Lots of tracks over a buck. I had a few problems with licenses that just wouldn't work. They quickly credited my account (they never could fix the problems).

Overall pretty good, but I'm liking the other services better, mainly because I want to get a better quality than the 128kbps fixed rate they encode with.

Pros: Web based, wma can burn via roxio, nice browsing.

Cons: 128kbps wma not as good as others, whacky licensing, no license backups.

Costs

Tracks are .79 and up, 9.95 for many albums.Some long tracks are 1.99. Has partial albums which are still downloadable at an album price.

File Format

WMA9 requires Windows Media Player 9 for the protection. Sampled at a fixed 128kbps, I heard artifacts on some things I got. Perhaps just luck of the draw, but I could tell.

DRM Restrictions

Here is where your head may rotate a bit. Each album and sometimes by track, may have different permissions. There is a key indicating how many copies to a computer, burn to cd, and export to portable may be done.

Bear in mind that for burning and exporting, this may only may be done by the primary computer, which is the first computer you play the song on! This can't ever be changed. So be careful!

Also, the DRM licenses that can be normally backed up in windows media player aren't allowed to be! This is risky stuff. Say you had a song on a computer with permission to play on one computer. Even if you back up that file, if your computer dies, you get a new one, or you otherwise make it look like your computer has been upgraded, blam, it's gone.

So for buymusic, you had better burn a copy right away!

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