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The Pirate’s Guide To Paying For Music
There is no need to rehash the endless discussion over what the effects of peer-to-peer music transfer are. It does however have one inextricable problem for those engaging in the sharing of music files, how do you support the artists that you love?
So for the pirate looking for a way to keep the flexibility of downloading discographies of music while keeping the price low and supporting the band, this is the pirate’s guide to paying for music.
We are going to look at three different services: Zune, Spotify, Play.me, and MOG in detail. Each has a different feature set, and a different plan for how to interact with music. After, we’ll get into what else is out there
Each was selected under the following criteria:
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- Must have a library in the millions of tracks which included mainstream labels.
- Must have a subscription option for simple payment.
- Must allow for unlimited listing.
Of course, there are a host of other music options, but we wanted to present you with a concise list of the star players. We are not including iTunes because it requires individual album/track purchases. It and Amazon have similar models. If you just want to buy a single track, those are good options. The selected options are tailored for an experience similar to torrent music: get quite a lot at once for a low, low price.
Zune
Quick facts: costs $14.99 monthly, you get some music forever, only in the US.
When Zune launched its devices and software, both were panned from the get go. While the devices have never found a serious audience, the software has excelled its hardware brother and become something to respect. I use Zune to manage my (annoyingly) massive library, you can read about the software itself here.
The Zune Pass costs $14.99 a month, and has two important points. First, you can download as much music as you want. If you keep paying the fifteen dollars monthly, those tracks are good to go. Stop paying, and they go dark. Also as part of the deal, is ten songs a month that you get to keep forever. Once you get used to a Zune Pass, it becomes quite intoxicating to download songs by the hundred, legally.
Of course, if you want, Zune sells tracks for a buck a piece or so, but you have to use Microsoft Points, so avoid it.
Problems: If you are not in the 50 States of Puerto Rico, you can get lost.
Spotify
Quick facts: streaming service that costs either nothing or €9.99 monthly.
Spotify has two flavors, free and premium. If you are a free user, you can listen to music, with advertisements, as much as you like. If you want to pay, for just ten euro you can be a premium user. This means no audio advertisement interruptions, higher sound quality, and no branding of the player.
Spotify, as does everyone it seems, sells songs for around a pound a piece.
The service has over six million tracks, and even integrates with Last.fm. For just ten euro, you get a heck of a lot: access without interruption to all the music you want instantly, no potential guilt.
Problems: If you do not live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France or Spain, you are out of luck.
Play.me
Quick facts: simple streaming service, low price, keep some songs.
Play.me is a completely browser-based service, except when they let you download .mp3’s. A newcomer, Play.me is more similar to Spotify then Zune. It lets you stream 2.5 million songs on its website, and gives you some free tracks to keep at the end of the month.
The free service is just ten hours a month, but oddly gives you a free download. For $9.99 you get unlimited streaming and five .mp3s monthly. Not a bad deal for just ten bucks. Also, you can save playlists and put them onto your iPhone via an application, meaning that you can make your streams good for the go.
Problems: Their library is smaller, US only.
MOG
Quick Facts: MOG is a big streaming service with millions and millions of tracks, cheap.
MOG is like Play.me, but cheaper, and with a better user interface. You can stream a a larger library than Play.me has, but their monthly plan does not include any .mp3’s that you keep. That might be a problem if you place a high value on what you have rights over.
At $5 a month, MOG All Access is ad free music nirvana. The service has received rave reviews for its construction, something that we cannot say about all music startups. It may have an odd name, but MOG is a cheap option if you like streaming.
Problems: US only, no keeping of tracks in the monthly plan.
The Rest
As we said up top, there are myriad music services. There is LaLa which allows for ten-cent song purchases if you keep the tracks online, and boasts an eight million track library. We would have included LaLa above, but given that they were purchased by Apple, we are not sure what the future of the service is, we felt ill at east recommending it.
There is also eMusic which sells music at $0.5 a track and also sells subscriptions where you only get music that you keep. And of course, there is the forthcoming MusicStation by HP that will coming soon to compete with Spotify.
This list is in flux, but you can be sure of one thing: competition wins for the consumer, you.
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So what is the best service? It depends on where you live and what you want. I use Zune already, so if I was to pick, I would use Zune. If I was living in Europe, Spotify is the easy choice. If I just want to use my browser (perhaps on my ChromeOS tablet?) then Play.me is the best fit. It’s up to you.
There are good options for listening to a lot of music for not that much money. We can all afford these. So, if you want to support the artists you love, you can.
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Discussion - 36 Comments/Pingbacks RSS feed for comments on this post
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Hmmm…funny no mention of Lala.com. I've been using Lala for awhile now, and have been pretty happy with it. The biggest single reason that I began using it was that the service allowed “purchasing” music at about .10 cents a pop for music you stream through the browser, and the service initially handed out 100 credits for me to play with on any songs I wanted. Plus, you can import all of your existing music to play in the cloud through their player as well. Not to mention that they were acquired by Apple only a couple months ago, which is newsworthy on its own.
Actually the best way to contribute to the artists you like is to do see them Live. Always has been.
Oh, agreed. However most of my pirate friends don't really go to live shows that much.
I agree, for bands I really love I just see them live and buy whatever merch I can get my hands on, so the money goes (almost) directly to them, and the big guys microsoft/apple/amazon etc. don't get a cut that they don't deserve.
Or how about legalsounds dot com? They charge you 9 cents a song that you get to keep forever. Way better than any streaming service in my opinion.
Or how about legalsounds dot com? They charge you 9 cents a song that you get to keep forever. Way better than any streaming service in my opinion.
No mention of Rhapsody? Been using it for years and for the most part I'm pretty happy with it.
And what about last.fm?
how about http://listen.grooveshark.com/ or GROOVESHARK dot COM? This is a really poor list. Digg sucks – Reddit rules.
I can't imagine they get a chance to whilst sailing the seven seas.
What about Bandcamp.com? There's some really great things going on there, and the great part of it is, most all the profits go directly to the artist if they're the ones posting it. There's also a lot of free stuff on there.
OMG are you kidding me? Who pays for music anymore? LOL
Jess
http://www.internet-anonymity.se.tc
Get real people who steal music don’t care about artists they are thieves That make out they are nice people who just steal because the price is not right. Come on your a thief so I never heard of a thief going back to the scene of the crime and saying here you go have some cash because I stole from you!
You steal you are not a music lover you are a common lowlife thief nothing more don’t rationalize stealing or try to make out your doing artist a favor or can help you are a low life if you steal anything!
Lowlife that steal should have thief tattooed on their head because that’s what you are!
come bring the noise!
challenge the truth but it will still be the truth!
http://www.ukunderground.com
Hey Mark, time to take your meds.
Hey Mark, time to take your meds.
Hey Mark, time to take your meds.
Hey Mark, time to take your meds.
Hey Mark, time to take your meds.
Hey Mark, time to take your meds.
An interesting article, Alex, but very US-centric. Would have been interesting to have included Sky Songs in the comparison
Interesting article, Alex, albeit very US-centric. It would've been useful to have seen how Sky Songs compared.
Psonar.com is another one try out. It has all the usual functionality in terms of uploading your content and streaming it over the web (it has a full-featured mobile site as well) but you can also use the site to manage and move your music across all of your devices (a la iTunes, but for every device you can connect to a computer.)
Rich discovery across all the tracks in the Psonar Cloud and social features are coming soon.
This is a bullshit report. I don't want to pay per time period. I only want to pay for what I actually get, and I don't want to pay for random crap.
I do quite like the Zune model was it not for the DRM and Spotify looks like a really superb service I could take with me on my Android phone. Sadly neither is available in my country.
For now I buy my music from places like Magnatune or directly from the artist.
to bad they are not available in my country…
Nonsense, it's just a pirate excuse. For years, live gigs and tours were a money-losing activity to support records sales. These days, big artists can make some profits by asking huge ticket prices. Indie bands still cannot do a tour without making a loss. If you want to make ludicrous statements like these, please support them with figures.
Contrary to what the name suggests, that service is definitely not legal outside Russia. If you want to support Russian pirates with some cash, fine, but don't expect any of that to end up at the artists.
Lets make this clear: “legalsounds” gives NO MONEY to the artist, and distributes music without the consent of artists or labels. so this is piracy, pure and simple.
The only difference between this site, and the old fashioned piracy we all know and love, is that this time somebody is expecting you to pay.
The question is, what kind of idiot pays money to steal music?