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.

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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.

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The iTunes catalog now contains more than 5 million songs, 550 TV shows, and 500 movies.

Source: Apple

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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.

More information …

Kensington FM Digital Transmitter/Auto Charger for iPod

List price: $79.95
Buy.com price: $50.99
$20.00 Mail-in Rebate
$30.99 After Rebate

More information …

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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).

Positives

• Lowest price per track: $0.22 - $0.25.
• Works with iPods and older portable MP3 players (in addition to your computer).
• Allows most flexibility of any music service on what you can do with the music you have downloaded: unlimited CD burning, download to multiple computers and MP3 players.

Negatives

• The 40 downloads per month work the same way as the minutes of most cell phone plans: if you don’t use them you lose them, they do not roll over to the next month. But even if you’re a moderate consumer of music, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding 40 new tracks that you’ll want to add to your collection each month.
• With 1 million tracks in their library it is not the largest music service out there. Click here to see if they have your favorite artists.

Current Special Offer

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.

Is it Right for You?

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.

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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

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Virgin Digital U.K. musicstore continues to operate.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety

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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.

Positives

• $4.99 is the lowest price per month for a legal music subscription service.
• If you are already a subscriber then $0.79 is also a good deal compared to Wal-Mart’s $0.88 or iTunes‘ $0.99.

Negatives

• As with all subscription services, music will only play as long as you are a subscriber. (Does not apply to individual tracks that you have purchased and burned to a CD.)
• Only works with Windows XP.
• Portable MP3 players are limited to those that support WMA.

Current Special Offer

You can try Yahoo! Music Unlimited for free for 14 days.

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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.

Positives

• $0.88 is among the lowest price per track available. The common price level in the industry is $0.99.

Negatives

• The web site only supports IE.
• Purchased music is encrypted and governed by the DRM of Windows Media Player.
• Only works with Windows.
• Limited music selection: Mostly mainstream music and no “explicit” lyrics.

What can you do with your downloaded music?

• Download the music to one computer and transfer music to two additional computers.
• Make ten burns to a CD. You must use Windows Media Player to burn CDs and if you try to burn a song more than 10 times Windows Media Player will refuse. CDs that you burn are playable in any regular CD player.
• Make unlimited transfers to a portable device.

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.

Portable Players

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

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.
		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)

Pricing

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.

Refunds

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.

What are you promised?

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.

What are you really paying for?

• The software is free. You are paying for the online help and support and the online tutorials for the lifetime of the membership.
• Purchase is not a licence to share copyrighted material.

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.

Privacy

There is no privacy policy on the site.

Summary

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.

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