The Zune Insider blog reports that the suggested retail price for Zune will reduced to $199 starting today.
It’s pure coincidence that Apple is having a special event today in San Francisco where it is speculated that new iPods will be launched and that Beatles music will finally become available on iTunes.
With subscriptions from Napster, Yahoo! Music Unlimited and now eMusic you can transfer your music from your computer to your AT&T cellphone. The list of compatible phones include AT&T 8525, BlackBerry Curve, Cingular 3125, LG CU500, Nokia N75, Samsung SYNC, Samsung BlackJack, Samsung a717, Sony Ericsson W300i and Sony Ericsson W810i. Notably absent from the list is the iPhone.
With eMusic you get 25 free downloads for just trying the service. You get to keep the songs both on your computer and on your phone if you discontinue the service.
Apple announced today that the iTunes Store has sold more than 3 billion songs since it’s debut on April 28 2003. It took almost 3 years to sell the first billion songs, less than a year for the second billion, and now just six months for the third billion. Scraping together that first billion is always the hardest…
The iTunes catalog now contains more than 5 million songs, 550 TV shows, and 500 movies.
Source: Apple
List price: $279.95
SAVE $129.96
Buy.com price: $149.99
The Sansa e280 8GB Digital Multimedia Device is the flagship product of SanDisks audio line. Features include music, photo, and video clip playback. It has a nice 1.8 TFT color screen with advanced navigational features and an easy to use interface. If you need more storage a microSD expansion slot allows for additional memory capacity. The Sansa e280 8GB Digital Multimedia Device supports Microsoft PlaysForSure subscription music.
List price: $79.95
Buy.com price: $50.99
$20.00 Mail-in Rebate
$30.99 After Rebate
eMusic offers an interesting combination of a subscription service and pay per track. Here’s how it works: You pay $9.99 per month and that gives you 40 downloads for that month. This works out to $0.25 per track - not a bad deal.
What’s even better is that the music that you download is standard MP3 files. This means that they work with all portable music players, including iPod. You can also burn the music you download to CDs as many times as you want, and download to multiple computers.
If you want more than 40 tracks per month eMusic offers higher subscription levels: 65 for $14.99 ($0.23 per track) and 90 for $19.99 ($0.22 per track).
Try eMusic for free for 14 days and get 25 MP3s free. Even if you cancel your trial subscription you get to keep the music you’ve downloaded. Click here to sign up.
If you want to own the music that you download and be able to load it onto your portable MP3 player (including iPods and older MP3 players), eMusic is probably the best deal available today. If you mostly play music from your Internet connected computer and you want to sample a lot of music, then an unlimited subscription from Napster or Rhapsody is probably a better fit for you.
The current 350,000 AOL Music Now subscribers will be migrated to the Napster service keeping any music they have purchased. The monthly fee ($9.95) will remain the same.
According to reports the 350,000 subscriber base is 100,000 lower then when AOL acquired the Music Now service from Circuit City Stores in 2005.
After the recent announcement that Virgin Digital is closing the doors on its U.S. operations, there are only four remaining digital music subscription services in the U.S.: eMusic, Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music Unlimited.
Sources: Napster, PC World, WebProNews
Richard Branson’s Virgin Digital has shut down its musicstore in the U.S. Over the holidays, Virgin Digital U.S. emailed subscribers informing them the service would be shutting down. Napster has acquired the exclusive right to market directly to Virgin’s existing subscribers.
Virgin Digital U.K. musicstore continues to operate.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety
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Price per Month | $5.99 - $8.99 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per Song | $0.79 | ||
| Size of Library | 1 million songs | ||
| Operating Systems | Windows XP | ||
| File Format | WMA | ||
| File Quality | 192 kbps | ||
| Portable Devices | Players that support WMA. Not compatible with iPod. | ||
| Available In | United States |
Yahoo! Music Unlimited is among the least expensive subscription services at $5.99 per month if you sign up for a year.
To transfer an unlimited number of songs to your portable MP3 player you need the Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go service.
As a subscriber you can stream an unlimited number of songs from their entire catalog. You can also save songs on your computer so you don’t have to be online to listen to music. If you want to burn music to a CD you have to pay per track. As a subscriber the price is $0.79, which is a 20% discount off the standard $0.99 price.
You can try Yahoo! Music Unlimited for free for 14 days.
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Price per Month | N/A | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per Song | $0.88 | ||
| Size of Library | 1 million songs | ||
| Operating Systems | Windows 2000 and XP | ||
| File Format | WMA | ||
| File Quality | 128 kbps | ||
| Portable Devices | Players that support WMA. Not compatible with iPod. | ||
| Available In | United States |
Wal-Mart’s music service is the third largest in the pay-per-song category, behind iTunes and Napster. True to their philosophy of low prices, they offer songs at the low price of $0.88 per song. You only pay for the songs you want, there is no monthly fee and the songs that you purchase are yours to keep. There is however some restrictions on what you can do with the songs: you can only play them on Windows compatible computers and portable devices that support WMA (no Macs, no iPods). These restrictions are common to most of their competitors, e.g. BuyMusic, MSN Music.
The library of 1 million songs is among the smaller in the industry; you will find mostly mainstream music here. But if the song you’re looking for is available at Wal-Mart for $0.88 instead of $0.99 at a competitor, then why not save some money? Use the search function below to find your favorite music.
Lawrence Lessig analyzed Wal-Mart’s terms of service back in 2003 and considered them to be among the most restrictive in the business. If you plan to use music you buy from Wal-Mart Music Downloads as an audio track for your home movies or computer slideshows, you can’t according to the TOS.
You can transfer the music you have downloaded to your portable player as long as the player is able to play WMA files encrypted with DRM. If your MP3 player has the PlaysForSure logo, it’s pretty sure to be compatible. You can also check Wal-Mart’s selection of MP3 Players to see if your player is listed. Those compatible with Wal-Mart Music Downloads include the following sentence in the description: “This WMA (Windows Media Audio) compatible player will work with Wal-Mart Music Downloads.”
As noted above, iPods are not compatible with this service.
Search Wal-Mart Music Downloads to see if they have your favorite music:
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URL | www.AccessMp3Music.com | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Affiliated Sites | live-wire2006.com, marketengines.com | ||
| Owner | Euclid Networks inc, Basseterre, St-Kitts This information is from their web site. The domain is registered via a proxy. |
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| McAfee SiteAdvisor Analysis | When we tested this site we found links to cashengines.com, which our analysis found to be deceptive or fraudulent. | ||
| Hosting | 66.152.85.116 Gamma Networking (formerly TSCNet) |
Lifetime Access $23.46. 2 Years Unlimited Access - $0.99/Month (= pay $23.76 up-front). 1 Year Access - $1.49/Month (= pay $17.88 up-front). Codec Pro Pack upgrade $12.95.
The site terms claim a 7 day satisfaction guarantee, minus a $9.95 fee, and some other caveats.
Here is a post from someone who actually managed to get a refund.
Once you become a member you are supposed to get: 100% Guaranteed software with no bundled spyware or adware. Just the greatest tools to download all of the music, video files and software you ever wanted.
Comments: This site actually mentions that you will get access to a P2P network. “the largest file sharing community on the Internet”. Of course they don’t mention that you don’t need their membership or to pay them anything to access this P2P network.
Not much to add here. It is clear that you are not paying for any copyrighted material. No part of the fee that you pay to become a member ever goes to artists or copyright owners.
There is no privacy policy on the site.
This is a scam. AccessMp3Music will happily take your money so that they can recommend free software which you can use to connect to a P2P network. Note that you do not need to be a AccessMp3Music member to connect to this P2P network.
P2P networks contain a lot of files, including viruses, adware and copyrighted material. As AccessMp3Music points out in their terms of use, it is illegal do download copyrighted material, and paying AccessMp3Music does not give you any license to download copyrighted material.
If you are looking to download commercial music don’t fall for AccessMp3Music. Instead check out one of the many reputable music services available.