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| Legal alternatives to stealing. |
Below are web sites, with my personal comments, presented in no particular order. They are here for your convenience. Please check with the company's web site to confirm any comments I may provide.
LEGAL DOWNLOADS: Some legal downloads are free, and others have a small cost.
- Napster (formally PressPlay): This is the system that I personally use. It costs only $9.95 a month for on-demand streaming, custom streaming radio stations, and unlimited downloads. It costs around a dollar per song to put them on a CD or MP3 player.
- Apple iTunes Music Store: While there is not a monthly fee to this service, you have to pay 99 cents for each song downloaded and burned. A Windows and Macintosh version is now available.
- MP3.com: This site contains a lot of legal MP3s that you can download, but most of them are from emerging and unsigned artists. If an artist wants their song to be available for a free download, it will probably be here.
- Legal MP3 Downloads by Online Tonight: Famed talk show radio host David Lawrence keeps this site updated with legal downloads of song, organized by artist.
"BAD" PROGRAMS: I consider the following programs to be "bad" meaning that they're used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. It is immoral, and usually illegal, to use these services:
- BearShare
- Gnutella
- Kazaa
- Limewire
- Morpheus
- Phex
- Shareaza
- WinMX
Basically, any program that allows you to download as much music as you want and burn it to CD without charging you for each individual song is illegal... even if they charge you to use the program. The only way to fairly give a cut to the record company as well as the artist is to charge for the music. Otherwise, it's stealing!
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