DRM Free Music

There are two types of DRM free stores that are available today. Ones that allow you to pay per song and own the song and others that allow you to pay a monthly fee for access to milions of songs and as long as you remain a subscriber you're free to listen to the music in any way you like.

The Amazon.com MP3 store offers Earth's biggest selection of a la carte, DRM-free MP3 music downloads. With over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels, Amazon MP3 complements Amazon.com's existing selection of over 1 million CDs to offer customers more selection of physical and digital music than any other retailer.

Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, organize their music using any music management application, and burn songs to CDs.

Most songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the 2 million songs priced at 89 cents. The top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, unless marked otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. The top 100 best-selling albums are $8.99 or less, unless marked otherwise.

Every song on Amazon MP3 is encoded at 256 kilobits per second, which gives customers high audio quality at a manageable file size.

Rhapsody offers subscription and pay-per song options, with individual titles costing about $.99. The music available from Rhapsody comes in a WMA or RAX PlaysForSure format, compatible with most MP3 players, except iPod. Competing closely with our #1 service iTunes, Rhapsody is the best choice for those that do not own an iPod.

With about four million plus titles and 22 genres of music available, Rhapsody is definitely an over-achiever in the music download industry. We were impressed with this store's selection and confident that you can find almost any artist or song.

Napster,with a library of over 3 million songs, we found every artist we were looking for with ease and velocity. And with Napster's music recommendations, we also discovered new songs and upcoming artists.

Napster prefers to work with signed artists on established labels. There are a number of smaller, independent labels included in the catalogue, but there is a clear preference for the majors, and we'd love to see that change in the future.