Market Leader

• The most famous, and most successful, music download site is Apple's iTunes. For 99 cents per song, a consumer can download and listen to digital music legally. The only drawback is that in order to play your music on anything other than a computer, you must own an iPod, iPhone or similar product. This is because Apple uses a proprietary software program to encode its music so that no other manufacturer's MP3 player will be able to read or play the music downloaded at iTunes. Still, iTunes is a popular source for digital music and the iPod is a popular digital music player.
  
  

Ex-Pirates

• Websites like Napster and KaZaa once were the most popular mediums of music exchange. These sites file-swapping or file-sharing sites facilitated the transfer of millions of songs every month. Several lawsuits by the recording industry against file-sharing sites led to a decline in illegal file sharing. Napster and KaZaa are still in operation, but have gone legit. It is now possible to find and download millions of songs on both websites for 99 cents each. The MP3s downloaded at these sites work on the majority of portable music devices, making them extremely popular and profitable websites.
  
  

Licensing

• One way of downloading music legally is through a licensing agreement. Essentially, you pay a subscription fee to a music download site such as MusicMatch or Rhapsody and are allowed to download as much music as you want. Theoretically, you could download every single song on their servers all for one monthly fee. Sites such as Rhapsody and MusicMatch pay a recurring license fee to the recording industry and then charge the consumer a fee to "borrow" that license.
  
  The downside to this licensing agreement is that you do not "own" the song outright, as you would with iTunes or Napster purchases. Instead, you are renting the music and within a month or so of stopping your subscription service, your MP3 player will no longer play those songs. Each song downloaded through a license agreement is tagged with a digital code that works like an expiration date; if the date has passed and the license (or expiration date) has not been renewed, the music will not play.
  
  

Cheap Music

• Another legal way to download music, but without the hassle of licensing, is to find cheap downloads. Currently, the online leader of cheap and legal downloads is Wal-Mart. For 88 cents, a consumer can download a song from Wal-Mart's vast library, saving about 11 cents per transaction which, if you download a lot, can save quite a bit in the long term.
  
  One of the downsides to downloading at Wal-Mart is their decency standards. Many songs with explicit (or somewhat explicit) lyrics are either unavailable or have been digitally altered by the artist to remove the offending language. For example, Wal-Mart has refused to carry certain Eminem songs because of their mysogynistic, violent or drug-related lyrics.
  
  

Free and Legal

• There are some ways to download music you like for free and still remain legal. One such site is SpiralFrog (see Resources, below). SpiralFrog is a subscription service similar to Rhapsody but instead of charging the consumer the price of the license, it generates revenue through advertisements for sale on the website. In return, consumers are asked to click through banner ads, but this is not required. And as long as the consumer logs onto SpiralFrog and downloads a song every month, the license never expires. A drawback to SpiralFrog, however, is that some major artists are not available for download. Still, many artists such as Rihanna and U2 do allow SpiralFrog to purchase the license to their songs, leaving literally millions of songs available for download.