Today there is a huge raft of places available to download music from. Some of these are legal sites, some are definitely not and some appear to lay somewhere in the middle. In addition to this, some artists allow tracks to be downloaded from their own websites, however, these tend to be short previews at a low quality sampling rate, appetizers to entice you to buying their music at full price.



Most music downloads are protected with "Digital Right Management" (DRM) which restricts the ability to transfer the downloaded track onto more than one device. Many users feel this to be unfair as they may want to put the music on one device that they own.

It is estimated that the online music business now makes up over 10% of the global music market; in 2008 an estimated 10 billion songs equalling 76,000 years of continuous playtime were downloaded! The vast majority of these were offered through peer to peer websites with an estimated 1 billion downloaded legally. How long these sites can keep operating for is unsure as so many legal cases are being brought against them. We have also seen legal cases being brought against individuals who are sharing files on these peer to peer sites. In short, our advise to you is to avoid them.

Yet even legal music downloads are facing challenges from artists, labels and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). This came to a head in 2007 when Universal Music Group decided not to renew their long term contract with iTunes. This was due to Universal wanting more control over the pricing that iTunes dictated, they favored a move from the traditional 99¢ a song that iTunes charges to a more variable rate based on artist.

As mentioned above, the majority of music is downloaded illegally. This is a highly dangerous practice that could potentially carry a significant threat of infecting your pc with a virus. Numerous peer to peer sites such as Limewire and Bearshare have sprung up offering a way to download music, but beware, music is not all you might get! Make sure you have a good antivirus program, these are freely available and one such as AVG should fit the purpose perfectly. Also ensure you have a good spyware program place, just in case your machine does become infected.

Most importantly, use a reliable service such as Legalsoundz – guaranteed free of viruses and safe to use. It has an excellent software download manager (free to download) and songs are much cheaper than iTunes at only 9¢ a song, definitely the choice of myself. I have been using this service for 5 years now and never had a problem. Every download is of high quality and with a reasonable connection a whole album can be downloaded in under five minutes due to their powerful servers.

Another must to remember is to back up your music often, if possible to a removable hard drive. This will ensure you can recover your music should the worst happen! There would be nothing worse than losing your entire collection of music