Free Music Downloads or Paid?

You have quite a few choices when looking for music on the Internet. There are many services to choose from like Yahoo, Napster, Itunes, etc. Most services have a few options to choose from plus your frequency of payment. How do these services stack up against the Free peer to peer sites? In this article I will discuss the options and the difference in the paid and the free.

Free vs Paid

You can get your music through one of the peer-to-peer services like Limewire, Kazaa, etc. However, this music and files is not really legal. The arguments of these types of sharing files type services has been discussed for years.

The biggest reason for not downloading music from sharing sites is you never know what your getting. Some peer-to-peer have some spyware programs that run in the background. Kazaa has been known to do this in the past.

The music you download could be infected or could be of low quality. Another thing since many people share files different compression and mp3 codecs could be used that will not allow the file to play until you find the right codec.

If you have downloaded music from file sharing sites before one song could be louder and the another could be to soft. The reason is people who compress the music for sharing each have their own settings. You could have a play list mix of low quality and better quality of music. The music would not be uniform.

Paid options

Many of the services will allow you to sample music and if you want it you can pay for the song individually at 99 cents per track. Walmart has a music site at 88 cents per track.

Other options allow you to have basic monthly fee which allows you listen to as many songs as you want and save them on your play lists. You can't download them normally with the basic service but only to be able to listen to them and the sites many radio stations. You have two options for the basic service you can pay monthly at a higher rate or pay annually for a reduced rate.

The premium service is usually called to go. This allows you download the songs and burn them or transfer them to your MP3 player or Ipod. This service can cost you a little more per month or you can pay annually and save.

Napster has a good deal where you can pay $14.95 per month and get a free Ipod. If you cancel before the year is up you still have to pay for the remaining months. They lock you in for 12 months because they give you a free Ipod. You can also pay with this service annually and save a few bucks.

No matter what service you end up choosing Paid is better than free in this case if you want quality.