Music Download Sites.com

You'll find lots of free information and advice at this website based on my own experiences.

Here's my story...

But if you're in a hurry to cut to the chase, here's the best of the music download sites that we've found.

Onward...

If, like me, you love music and spend hours listening to it each week, then no doubt you'll also spend a lot of your hard-earned cash on it.

In my "worst" period to date - September to December 1997 - I spent just over $4,500 on music. That's how much I love music and how seriously I take my hobby!

But geez, it can hurt!

Anyway, since then I've simply had to curb my passion a little - especially when I realised my CD collection now tops 500 albums. At, say $10-20 each, that's a lot of money I've spent on music.

Unfortunately, my wallet can never meet my lust for my favourite tracks so I set out looking for a more cost-effective way to get my hands on the latest tracks.

And that's when a friend of mine recommended I take a look at music download sites on the Internet.

Looking back, as an avid Internet user for years I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner.

What I found really impressed me. Whilst I tried lots and lots of different music download sites both free and paid-for, and whilst many were nothing short of terrible, I did manage to find a few that were nothing short of amazing. A veritable Pandoras box of quality tracks, perfect for people like me looking for cheap and free music to download off the Internet.

No exaduration, if my favourite sites were to double, or even quadruple, their membership fees I'd still continue my subsciption but it would still work out much, much cheaper for me than buying all the tracks in record stores.

But besides being much cheaper than buying CD's themselves (check out how much cheaper it is by visiting our downloadable music savings calculator page), even from the Internet, there are several other benefits of buying your tracks from downloadable music sites...

• Speed of delivery - if you want to buy music, you generally have two options. Either get them directly from a record store meaning you have to physically find the time to go shopping, go to the record store and search for what you're looking for, hoping they have it in stock, and you're looking in the right place. Or you use mail order - either from a catalogue or the Internet. It can take days or even weeks for your CD's to turn up by this method.

  But using downloadable music, if you want a track, you just log on, and within minutes it's on your computer ready for you to enjoy. It's 7pm, in the middle of winter. It's dark. It's cold. It's raining. You really fancy listening to that new CD you saw advertised on the TV earlier.

  But you use music download sites so no problem. Bam! It's all yours. Now.

• Freedom to mix your own CDs - you can make up your own "greatest hits" CDs. No doubt you've bought albums in the past which contain just a few key tracks that you love, but they're in amongst a load of other "reasonable but not great" tracks. With music download sites and downloadable music it's no problem as you make the CDs - you decide on the tracks and the lineup. You can even get mp3 editor software to mix your tracks together like a professional DJ! So you decide what goes on your CDs.

• Fewer size limitations - as one of the main principles of downloadable music is not just practicality and cost, but taking out the parts of the track the human ear simply can't hear, mp3s offer a greatly reduced track in terms of the memory required to record them. Therefore some mp3 portable players are capable of storing literally hours of music rather than the rather limited uses of standard CDs.

• Amazing choice - because music download sites store all their tracks on their servers, there are no physical products (tapes, CDs, vinal etc.) to ship. This means that storage space is far less of an issue. No costly warehouses are required, just a reliable computer center. And with a few decent servers, the Internet's top music download sites can offer literally hundreds of thousands of tracks. Take a look at just a small selection of the styles of downloadable music available at my personal favourite music download site. Compare that level of choice with your average record store - there really is no comparison!

Therefore it follows that a decent amount of content on this site is dedicated to reviews of these top music download sites.

I hope you enjoy my project and using the information I have provided get as much pleasure (and make as many savings!) as I have from music download sites.

Keep an eye out for the easy-to-use links boxes at the bottom of every page on this site, and please tell your friends if you like this site, or provide a link from your website to mine.

Best of luck with your passion!

Warm regards,

Richard Adams