Favourite Online Music Stores

Posted on: Monday, 18 August 2008, 00:00 CDT

* iTUNES Store

ITunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It is now the No. 1 music vendor in the United States. As of June 2008, the store has sold five billion songs, and has six million songs accounting for more than 70 per cent of worldwide online digital music sales.

* GoMusic

GoMusic is a Russian music download site. It offers a variety of music, including special collections, and audiobooks in Russian and English. Songs are priced per song, with prices averaging 15 cents (50 sen). Audiobooks, on the other hand, range between US$2.95 and US$5. The site has 2,650,000 songs.

* Napster

Napster Inc is an online music service offering a variety of purchase and subscription models. The company's name and logo derive from the former Napster peer-to-peer file trading service, which was shut down after a series of legal actions taken by the RIAA. The brand name was later purchased by Roxio, to capitalise on the popularity of the former service. The site has six million songs.

* eMusic

EMusic is an online music store that operates by subscription. It is headquartered in New York City and owned by Dimensional Associates, LLC. eMusic differs from well-known subscription music services such as Napster and Rhapsody as the files are in MP3 format, making them compatible with all digital music players, and free from digital rights management software restrictions such as expiration dates, or copying or CD burning limitations. The site has two million songs.

* Rhapsody

Rhapsody is an online music service run by RealNetworks. Launched in December 2001, Rhapsody was the first to offer streaming on- demand access to its library of digital music. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, RealNetworks' version of digital rights management. The site has five million songs.

* Gua Muzik

On April 14 this year, gua.com.my launched its GUAMuzik online shop. The paid music portal can be reached at http:// www.guamuzik.com.my. It offers various genres of music from local and international artists. Besides that, it also offers songs from Fly FM, Hot FM and Muzik Muzik which can be downloaded. Each song costs RM3.

* Jiwang.org

Jiwang.org is a non-profit organisation. It is powered by a group of people connected to the Internet offering Malaysian and Indonesian songs.

* MP3.com

This is a well-organised MP3 store which offers accessories and songs in genres such as rock, hip-hop, R&B, and jazz. It even includes spoken words and audio book downloads. It also offers visitors the music services, and software.

* Yahoo! Music Unlimited

Yahoo! Music Unlimited is an on-demand online music service launched on May 11, 2005 and provided by Yahoo! Music. Users just need to pay a subscription fee to access a library of over two million songs which could be either streamed or downloaded as DRM WMA files and played from a computer in near CD quality sound.

* PayPlay.FM

PayPlay.FM currently offers over 1,970,000 songs of independent music in MP3 and WMA DRM formats. The store has been added to the Windows Media Online Store. The music in the store is sold at 192 kilobit-per-second (VBR) WMA and MP3 files.

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Source: New Straits Times via redOrbit