Gift Ideas for the Music Lover in Your Life -- Besides an iPod

It's the time of year once again. A time when we all grab those little plastic cards and all the greenbacks we can get our hands on in an attempt to get "the perfect gift" for everyone on our lists. If there's a big music lover in your household, then here are a few suggestions as to what you can spend that hard-earned cash on that'll be guaranteed to put a smile on their face and a buzz in their ears.

You'll probably notice that none of the suggestions are an iPod or any other portable music player. For our purposes here, we just assumed that most music lovers already have one of those devices by now.

iTunes Match - For $24.99 per year, your music lover can enjoy clean, fresh copies of every song in their iTunes library. Every time they rip a new CD to their collection, iTunes will automatically update their iCloud to contain the new CD's contents. If your music lover's CD catalog has a ton of scratches and nicks, they can rip those and get great sounding copies of the music from the service.

Spotify Premium Subscription - Spotify's Premium service allows users to have access to all of Spotify's extensive music catalog from anywhere in the country using any Internet-capable computer or on their app on your smartphone. The fee for the convenience is $9.99 a month. Considering just how much content that price point is getting you, the value is definitely in the service. Spotify has really made an impact in cyberspace since it splashed down stateside earlier this fall. The online streaming music service had enjoyed tremendous success overseas, and since going public here in the United States, they have developed a close relationship to the biggest social media site in the game, Facebook.

iTunes or Amazon Gift Cards - With individual track prices starting around 79 cents a piece, a great bang-for-buck purchase for anyone who loves music are gift cards for iTunes or Amazon. Even at $10 or $15 a gift card could get that music fan in your life quite a bit of musical satisfaction.

A Box Set or CD Collection - If you're feeling frisky and loose with your funds, maybe you should dive deep and get them a box set or collection of CDs from a particular artist. Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Tony Bennett, Billy Joel and U2 have all released either massive collections of their work (Pink Floyd, Billy Joel, Tony Bennett), or they've released special additions of iconic albums (NIrvana). Ranging in price from $25 on up to beyond $500, it just all depends on how much you want to spend, and how prolific you want the collection to be.