Music download web sites allow music lovers to access and purchase a large variety of songs and music videos online. Most of the early websites offering music downloads were illegal. However, after years of dominance by illegal sites and by peer to peer sharing applications that made swapping MP3 files easy, legal download services are rapidly becoming popular. With a large number of legal download sites emerging, it has become difficult to find out where to get the best deals and which sites to trust.



Some of the most popular music download sites like Napster, eMusic and Rhapsody, offer free music trials. I know Napster and Rhapsody offer a 7 to 14 day free trial. eMusic offers its customers 25 free downloads, with sign up.

There are over 2 Million songs available on Napster and Rhapsody whatever your taste in music, you will have an enormous selection to choose from. Other than a few notable artists that for whatever reason decided not to license their music to Yahoo (Beatles, Led Zeppelin), I was hard pressed to find any music that I wanted to hear that wasn't available.

It's true that your subscription doesn't allow you to burn the music to CD (though the tracks are available for purchase). However, it is so easy to hook your portable music device to either your home or car stereo that this drawback really doesn't prevent you from enjoying your subscription in almost any environment.

eMusic isn't just for Rock n' Roll buffs?the selection of Country, Jazz & Blues is every bit as deep. Plus, there exists the ability to discover new music by letting Yahoo know your musical preferences. You can also create your own radio stations, and listen (and chat with) people with similar musical tastes as yours. The sound quality of the music is excellent. Unfortunately, their Music Jukebox, though having great features, is a bit of a memory hog'I tried uploading a large file to Google Base while listening and froze my system

Music download sites generally charge their customers either a fixed price for each music file that is downloaded or a monthly subscription fee and a charge for music downloaded. In case a monthly fee is charged, the cost for each track downloaded is generally lower than those sites which do not charge a subscription fee. Often the latest music tracks are priced more than tracks that have been released earlier. To encourage music lovers to buy music tracks in larger quantities, some online music stores offer progressive pricing which allow users to buy tracks at a cheaper rate if they increase the quantity of music tracks they purchase. The number of songs on these online stores range from about half a million on emusic to over a million and a half on itunes.

There are websites out there that are 100% legal like Napster, eMusic and Rhapsody just to name a few. thses sites also have a better quality of music files that want harm your computer. The question now is how much money are you willing to pay to download all of the hottest songs today, and are you willing to pay extra to put those songs onto a CD?