It's no wonder that MSN Music has become one of the most popular audio download services. The site offers a fantastic library of 1 million downloads to choose from.
All downloads are fully legal so you’ll have no worries there and it’s hard to believe that you won’t find something you like on their site.
Most of the songs on MSN Music sell for around $0.99 – so, if you use the service you’ll generally pay less for music than if you were buying a CD in a store. And, as with the majority of download services, you can cherry pick the tracks you want to buy – you don’t have to generally pay for a whole album if all you want to do is to get your hands on a single track.
One of the big advantages with this service is that it works on the basis of the downloads you buy. So, you don’t have to subscribe and pay a regular fee to keep your subscription active – you simply pay for what you buy when you buy it. This also means that you won’t fall foul of the kinds of rights issues that subscription based services can cause when you stop subscribing – i.e. you won’t lose your music with MSN Music.
There's more to this site than just a music store, however. It is full of other interesting stuff such as music news, reviews and artist/band information. You can listen to the music you buy on your PC (or on up to 5 Windows PCs), transfer it to a portable player such as an MP3 player (or even multiple players if you like) or even burn it to CD. The whole system here has been set up to work with the Windows Media Player software package so you should find it real easy to manage and listen to your music.
One thing to remember here is that this is a Microsoft–centric system that has been purely designed to work with Windows Media Player. So, all tracks are only available in a WMA format and not in MP3. If you can’t play WMA but want to use the store then you'll have to convert the tracks once you buy them which could be time consuming.
You may also find that there are certain issues with transferring the tracks you download to portable digital devices. To find out whether your player will work with this service then you’ll need to work out if it is compatible with the PlaysForSure system. This is a relatively new system so there is no guarantee that older MP3 players will work here.
Due to record company restrictions not all tracks listed on the site are available to be purchased individually. In some cases record companies insist that you can buy the album online via download but you can't purchase individual tracks from it.
So, it's all or nothing in these cases.
And, some albums are listed on site but aren’t available for download – the site can only link you to a music retailer. Again this is based on the record companies view on digital downloads as opposed to CD sales.
One last thing to remember is that the tracks you download here will all be rights protected. So, you can do a lot with them but you still have to buy them with restrictions of use. For example, you can only burn playlists to CD up to seven times at the moment.
Due to the fact that this service works with Windows Media Player you just can’t officially use it with an iPod. One way round this if you really do want to use the service is to buy the downloads and then burn them to a CD. You can then transfer the tracks from the CD into iTunes where it will (hopefully) make them playable for you.
Finally, you can get yourself some free music with this site if you shop around. The site itself often has special offers such as 'Buy1, Get 5 Free' and they have an active network of subscription and shopping partners that often offer free downloads for purchases. You can find relevant partner links on the site’s home page.
Check out more information on legal MP3 downloads .