ZDLR's guide to online Music Services

Well, I know there are a lot of people that pirate music, but I am not one of them. I like to buy my music, especially when I know I am supporting an artist I enjoy. I thought I would make a thread as a resource for everyone here on sites to buy music from online.

To start off, here is a list of legal music providers certified by musicunited.org:



Amazon.com
AOL Music
Apple's iTunes Music Store
Artist Direct
AudioCandy
BestBuy
BET
BuyMusic.com
Catsmusic
CD Baby
Circuit City
College Concerts
Compact Disc World
Corner CD
Dimples Music
Electric Fetus
Emusic
Exitos Musical
French Pro-Music
Full Audio's MusicNOW
FYE
Gallery of Sound
German Pro-Music
iMesh
Independent Record
Instavid
Latin Noise
Lifeway
LiquidAudio
Mainstreet
Millennium Music
MIRA Coalition
MP3.com
Musicmatch
Music Millennium
MusicNet@AOL
Music Rebellion
Napster
Netscape Music
New World Record
Passalong
Peer Impact
Pro-Music
Quonset Hut
RasputinMusic
RealNetworks' Rhapsody
Record and Tape Trader
Rolling Stone
Ruckus
Sam Goody
Sony Connect
Spinner
Streamwaves
Top Hits Music
Tower Records
Wal-Mart
Windows Media
Yahoo Music Unlimited

Here is a list of DRM-Free Music Providers with short descriptions:

DRM= Digital Rights Management, i.e. an mp4 from Itunes.

emusic: www.emusic.com

eMusic is among the top digital music services, selling millions of downloads each month and offering a diverse catalog of over 2 million tracks from established and emerging artists in every genre from the world's top independent labels. Unlike other services that restrict what you can do with your music, eMusic allows members complete flexibility to burn CDs, transfer to MP3 devices and make multiple copies for personal use. eMusic subscription plans are also extrememly affordable, with per track costs that are a fraction of what you'd pay for music on other major digital music stores

Emusic is my favorite music provider personally...

Audio Lunchbox: www.audiolunchbox.com
Looks to have a pretty good selection of indie bands. Plus some not-so-indie artists like Bob Marley, Sloan, Hot Hot Heat... Only mp3 192kbps VBR format. Would love to try it out but only available in the USA so to hell with them.

Livedownloads: www.livedownloads.com/
Professionally mastered recordings of live performances from a number of bands. Also some studio recordings for some bands. Primarily jambands like Widespread Panic and The String Cheese Incident but also a growing number of bands not traditionally associated with the jamband scene such as Gomez, The Go! Team, Iron & Wine (to name a few). Both mp3 and FLAC format - although you must understandably pay more for FLAC. A good choice if you'd like higher quality than is available from the free etree or EZTorrent

Live Phish: www.livephish.com/
Similar to the above but only for the now-defunct band Phish as well as current projects of former members - for example Vida Blue. Trey Anastasio studio albums are also available. mp3 and FLAC format.

The Philadelphia Orchestra music store: www.thephiladelphiaorchestra.com/
Similar in concept to the above two music stores, with both live and studio music from - you guessed it - The Philadelphia Orchestra. mp3 and FLAC.

Magnatune: magnatune.com/
mp3 format only. A number of relatively obscure bands in a wide number of genre's, with some very liberal licencing policies. I like the integration with Amarok.

All of Mp3: allofmp3.com
Just about everything an online music store should be, except for the questionable legality. A huge selection, in a wide variety of customizable formats (mp3, ogg vorbis, flac). The legality has been debated long and loud - just google for more information. I'm not interested in rehashing any of it except to say this - none of the money paid by customers to Allofmp3 for music ends up in the hands of the artists. However this is not because the royalties are not made available to them - royalties are paid by Allofmp3 to the Russian ROMS where they are made available to the artists or record labels. The recording industry refuses to claim the royalties from the ROMS because it would legitimize Allofmp3s business model which they are very much against (because they can't control it). Make your own decision about whether or not to use it. Personally when I pay money for music it's to support the artists, not the music store, not the record labels and not the Russian government - so from that perspective, whether Allofmp3 is legal or not, I don't really see how it's any better than piracy.

www.lavamus.com and www.legalsounds.com are spin offs of allofmp3, and lavamus actually allows paypal payments.

music.download.com

They've got some free mp3's. Not like a music service as much as it is to let you listen to some music before buying ppl's cds.





Attention College students:

If you have a college email, you are in luck.

www.ruckusnetwork.com/



The music library is really good. You can't download .mp3's obviously, but you download a ruckus song file that plays in the Ruckus player. If nothing else, you can listen to whole songs from a library of 2.5 million songs. Thats about it, but I use Ruckus to preview albums before I buy them, its a really cool site, and it is totally legal.




Well I hope this list helps out, enjoy.