The Best Way To Download Music

Where to get your mp3s and discographies

If you’re still looking for a good way to find music online or you simply want a better method, this is your guide. There are lots of places today where you can download music illegally or legally (pay for it). They range from good to bad to ugly. As with any questionable or controversial media, use caution if you choose to engage in something illegal. You should be aware of what you are doing and how it can affect you. This guide does not condone pirating music, it merely lists sources for educational purposes.

The Fun Way: The best way to download illegal media nowadays is through Bittorrent websites. Torrents have flooded the internet in the last couple of years, easily becoming the largest medium of file-sharing on the internet. This includes all media (Music, Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Games, and Porn). There are many websites that make you register in order to participate in their pool of files. I avoid those since I don’t have time to register or beg for registration. But these are still probably the best sites to get your torrents from. You may have heard of Oink being recently shut down for leaking loads of albums. We might expect many more of these illegal sites to get shut down in the future. But this will not even dent or slow down the amount of torrent files out there. Try a google search of torrent sites to see how many come up.

Anyways, since there are many, I’ll share some of my favorites here. I particularly enjoy isoHunt because its free, requires no registration, and has quite an extensive database. You can find almost anything here. I usually find a lot of full albums and even whole band discographies packaged into convenient torrent files. But, the best way to search is to use a whole bunch of sites together, to expand your possibilities. Here’s a good article about useful torrent websites, The Top 35 Torrent Sites of 2007.

The downsides to using torrents are that you need BitTorrent client software (Vuze, or the lighter BitTornado), and that this is still an illegal method of file-sharing. Use caution if you do choose to download torrents.

Don’t use LimeWire, Ares, or Kazaa, cause they are really inefficient and contain spyware. It is also easier for the authorities (should they choose to) to monitor your illegal activities if you use these programs. This is probably the worst method for downloading music.

The Good Way: If you want to play it on the safe side, purchase your music. This not only guarantees that artists and musicians get their slice of the pie, but it keeps you out of jail. If you want the convenience of online downloading, you can visit a whole range of websites and programs today that allow you to buy music and download it legally. The iTunes Music Store is probably a good place to start. You can also check out Yahoo Music Downloads and Napster. Yahoo and Napster give you a free trial, which is cool if you wanna check them out. iTunes probably has a more extensive library and an easy-to-use interface. The downside is, you have to download the iTunes and Napster software to download music.

With iTunes, the upside is their music store also has lots of other media. Aside from music, you can download music videos, tv shows, and even movies. The downside is a lot of times, they only have full albums and not individual songs to download. Also, their content is locked. That means, when you buy it, it comes in m4p encrypted format. You cannot play these files on other music players because they are not mp3 files. While the files are close to cd-quality, their encryption makes them cumbersome. Of course, you can always work around that by burning the files to a cd and re-ripping them as mp3s or other formats.

Napster and Yahoo make you sign up for a trial in order to download their software. I didn’t bother signing up to write this article because they make you register a credit card even if its simply for the trial period. From what I’ve heard, Napster is another alternative to downloading legal music files and they claim to have “millions of songs.” Yahoo also claims to have 2 millions songs. If you care to pursue either of these options, the most notable difference is probably in their price. For the most part, all the outlets that make you pay to download music have the same music, which is usually the mainstream Pop, Rock, Hip-Hop, and Country.

The biggest problem with all these outlets is that they charge too much for the downloads in order to be a good alternative to using torrents. 10 dollars for a CD is less than you would pay in a store, but for most people who are used to downloading music for free this is still way too much. We now turn to the best alternative.

The Best Way: So far, I haven’t found any similar websites, but I’m sure they already exist and will keep popping up all over the place. I don’t know how they are allowed to sell music for so little, but mp3fiesta charges about 99 cents per album and about 10 cents per song to download. They also have a very extensive database of music. They boast over 1 million songs. You can search the site without downloading any software to see all the music they have. You also don’t need to download any software. Simply sign up and begin downloading music. The cons are that you are only given a window of 48 hours to download your music, and when you sign up, they make you fill a certain balance ($20, 30, 50, 100) which then gets subtracted every time you buy an album or song. For me, this is the best method because they have a large collection of music and full albums only cost around 1 dollar.