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There are currently four ways to get music online now, and soon Napster 2. All have DRM: digital rights management, which is a bit of an oxymoron since they tend to take away rights! More on that later. If it weren't possible to get files (awkwardly) converted to mp3, nobody would use them! So in effect you're now may pay to break the law, but in my opinion, it's fair and ethical. I would't use peer to peer myself and it's been frustrating waiting for even just this!

Costs

All but one (emusic) have a cost per track, and album. The stinker in the batch is Rhapsody, which forces you to pay for the monthly streaming service

At times, buying the tracks is cheaper than the 9.95 album if there are fewer than ten! At times some tracks are only available as part of an album. And since all tracks are charged, some albums with little less than one minute intros on different tracks will get you if you buy individually. So you have to be very savvy when pricing out things.

And watch out for "partial albums", which unless you catch that wording, may seem like full albums. All tracks may not be there. On some services, they will not have rights for say one track on an album, and therefore make the whole album unavailable for the album price. On a double disc set, this stinks! You could end up buying 30 separate tracks for a buck, instead of having the option of the full album minus those missing tracks if you choose to accept that.

File Format

If it weren't for DRM, they could all use MP3 and make our day, but all don't except for Emusic. On windows, WMA9 indicates WMA with DRM and media player 9. The one nice thing about this format, is that it works with Roxio's Easy CD burning software (possibly others, let me know!), so you aren't tied to windows media player or the proprietary app. I found this useful since none of the other burners in the apps or media player will write cd-text information to a burned disc. This is used so certain stereos and rippers can get track names from a disc.

You may be aware that your normal CD's have track titles, but that's different. They use FreeDB or similar to download those titles from the internet. This won't work with downloaded/burned albums because they tricks they use to get the "signature" of the CD aren't there when you burn your own (that's oversimplified, just trust me!)

As far as quality goes, I won't get into a music compression primer, but higher bits is better, and variable encoding is generally. I could tell that MusicMatch's 160kbps variable encoding was a lot better than buymusic's 128kbps easily on old blues albums. Let your ears decide!

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