This was brought back to mind when I recently saw that “Now That’s What I Call Music! 73” had been released. Priced at £11.70 in my local supermarket but a monstrous £36.00 on one download service I saw. Hard to believe anybody would pay that, and certainly not me!

Anyway getting back to the story… Since I stopped downloading music, I’ve missed being able to listen to new music by streaming it. You know, it’s a good way of previewing music to see if the CD’s worth buying – so many CDs these days, it seems, are 1 or 2 good songs and the remainder crap! So off I went in search of a good music streaming service.

My first approach was to try a search: best music streaming service. From there I Checked out this post: “The World’s Top 10 Free Music Streaming Services”. Here I found a good list to think about, and some not-so obvious, including:

• Pandora
• Last.fm
• Seeqpod
• Spotify
• Myspace
• Rhapsody
• Imeem
• Deezer
• Skreemr
• Lala

I’m not going to go into much detail here as Crenk have done a good job of doing that and I suggest you check out their post for more details, here. In summary, these range from paid for music download and streaming services through social networks to search engines finding Mp3 on the web (are these legal?) and quiet a few have geographical limitations.

For me Spotify seemed to fit the bill. Just sign up for an account, download the software, log in and you’re away streaming a wide range of tunes, all be it peppered with the odd, un-skippable,  advert now and again. Not too intrusive though and no worse that commercial radio here in the UK but with the advantage I can pick and choose what I listen to. Of course, you can get a day pass for £0.99 or subscribe for £9.99 a month for an ad free experience. I didn’t subscribe. Call me scrooge if you like but £9.99 a month seemed to much for skipping an advert every 30 minutes or so, and you don’t get a great deal more value for your money as far as I can see. Greater quality streaming perhaps but not a lot of point on my laptop speakers.

So that was the situation until yesterday, when I heard about a new level of Napster membership called Unlimited. For £5 a month you can stream all you like and as many times as you like without ads and get 5 Mp3 downloads a month included and are free to buy more if I want. So I signed up straight away. For me this  seems the best way. I can stream music from any internet connected computer and get a few Mp3s for my Mp3 player every month. I can buy more if I want and of course I can still go an buy that cheap CD from my local supermarket if I want.

Until a few weeks ago I would have just downloaded it from Napster, but I cancelled my subscription because you pay forever and never really own any of the music you download. Every track is protected with DRM, so as soon as you stop paying you can no longer play the music. Ok, so there are ways around the DRM like this or this, but I don’t know if they are legal, so you may be well advised to steer clear of them.

Anyway, getting back to the tale… My initial though was to go and take a look at iTunes to pay for the download. I was a little taken aback when it found out that it costs £15.99 for the album. Next I decided to take a look at Amazon, which turned out to be a lot better at £11.98 for downloading the album but not so good when they are selling the CD for £10.78 with free delivery! Fortunately I decided to hold off buying it as on a trip to Morrisons, one of our local supermarkets, I found the very same album for only £10:00, so I bought it without hesitation.

I’ve never really questioned how economically beneficial it was to download music against buying the CD. I always assumed it would be cheaper to download as you don’t get the CD, jewel case or artwork. It seems that this was a totally wrong assumption to make. I find it quite amazing that it was actually cheaper to buy the CD rather then download the Mp3s. I can’t say if this is the same for every CD as I haven’t done much research, but it doesn’t make much sense. It seems you get less but pay more for it.

It all seems a bit screwed up to me. It seems that the music business has got a lot to learn about the public’s expectations when it comes to buying music on line.

Is it any surprise that illegal Mp3 downloads are so popular?