Music downloads are big news and big business these days. MP3 audio files are good quality, quick to download on Broadband, and can be transferred to portable players easily - so you can have a massive library of music on the move.
Legal Vs illegal downloads
The first music downloads to appear came from illegal file-sharing software, such as Kazaa and Morpheus, which allowed people to share their own MP3 files with anyone across the globe.
This breached copyright, and meant that artists weren't earning royalties as their music was being illegally copied. The American Record Industry began taking illegal downloaders to court, and the file sharing networks were soon being shut down. If you download music illegally on your PC, you could face fines of several thousand pound and possible criminal prosecution.
And what's more, you couldn't vouch for the quality or safety of the tracks you downloaded, which could contain viruses that damaged your PC or allowed a hacker to take control of it.
So a new wave of legal downloading services have sprung up, offering all the benefits of a massive online catalogue of music at your fingertips, but with none of the problems. Here's a rundown of the big three.
Napster
Napster has a catalogue of over 750,000 tracks from all the big record labels. You pay a monthly subscription fee to use the service, and can download as many tracks as you like to your hard drive. Then each track you copy to a CD or MP3 player costs you 99p. You can look at what other people are downloading too, so you can get recommendations and share your playlists with other users.
Sonic Selector
The UK's first download service has a catalogue of over 350,000 songs, and there are plans to expand the catalogue to over 1,000,000 tracks. The Sonic Selector service works by purchasing credits, which cost 1p each. You can listen to a track once via streaming for one credit, then if you like it you can download it for between 79 and 100 credits.
iTunes
This was the first legal download service in the US, and has now opened in the UK. It offers downloads exclusively for iPod users. There are over 700,000 tracks to choose from, and downloads cost 79p each. Tracks are encoded so that they can only be played on iPods, and will not work on other players, though they can be burnt to CD from your computer.