My comparison of music download services. Note that I have only included the bigger more mainstream services. There are many niche services, see the bottom of the post for a list of these.

I’ve included the Zune service for the sake of completeness even though it isn’t available in the UK yet.

I have omitted Napster’s basic services as it does not allow you to move the music to a portable player.

Personally I do not buy anything from stores that use DRM as I play my music on an a wide varietly of platforms. An iPod, a PSP and a Linux jukebox to name but three. Also who is to say what I’ll be playing music on in the future.

Undoubtedly the best in terms of both cost and quality of files is Allofmp3 but this site is of questionable legality and it looks like it’s days could be numbered.

I like tags. I use them a lot. I find the idea of going back to categories unappealing. Tagging reduces that “where does this belong?” conundrum as that usually arrises from having too many filing possibilities. I’ve been wanting to set up more detailed smart playlists in iTunes. Not just limit them to whole genres of music. For example I’d like to set up a playlist for songs that have a piano playing. As the piano can be found in many types of music I can’t use the genre ID3 tag. There is another way…

Use the comments to tag up the music, so songs with piano in them get the keyword ‘piano’ added, songs with female vocalists get a tag to that effect and so on. Then just create a smart playlist to check for these tags.

Update: Apple has now encripted their album art so this script doesn’t work anymore.

Found a really cool PHP script to download the album art from the iTunes store without being logged in. I’d get an iTunes account if there was an option to sign up for a free one without having to enter your credit card details. I have no intention of buying music at a crappy bitrate thats locked to iTunes. After all, what if I jump ship and buy a Zune?