Throughout the past few years downloading music on the internethas increased in popularity. At the same time though, it hasbecome illegal through many companies to download music asmusicians and artists have been losing money on their CD sales.With many people being sued in the past couple years fordownloading music, is it really possible to download musiclegally anymore? If so, at what price will it cost you todownload music?

As music sites such as Napster and Kazaa and many more haveattempted to create sites to download music for free, they havejust increased the problem that much more. Some of the users ofthese programs have learned the hard way that music does notcome free, as they were sued for illegally downloading music.

Today there are many sites in which you can download music atwhere they claim it is 100% legal. The latest music fileformats used are Windows? Media (WMA), Advanced Acoustic Coding(AAC) and Atrac 3, and are very popular as it increases thesound quality making it closer to an actual CD bought in stores.Another great advantage is that many sites such asSonicSelector Service on MSN allow you to preview the musicbefore buying it. Many sites today also offer a three-day trialof their music downloading site, and then after that you willhave to begin paying a monthly fee. So it is possible todownload music legally online, but at what cost?

Pressplay.com offers unlimited music for a price of $9.95 permonth and then you also have to install the software from theirsite. The downloaded music is non-burnable and once yoursubscription runs out you no longer have access to any of yoursongs. Rhapsody at listen.com also charges $9.95 per month fornon-burnable music, but instead of downloading the music youdownload a music player that gives you access to the songs.

Now you can download music and you know the basic price permonth for non-burnable songs. However, most people downloadmusic so that they can burn their favorite CD with a variety ofsongs. Transferring these songs onto a CD or a personal MP3player will cost you even more. Many sites offer packages forsongs capable of burning as oppose to a set price per song.

For example, Pressplay offers 5 burnable songs for $5.95, 10burnable songs for $9.95, 20 burnable songs for $18.95, and thenon top of those prices you are still required to pay the monthlyfee to use the program. MusicNet offers a package for $17.95 amonth that comes with unlimited downloading music and 10burnable songs.

There are other sites such as apple.com/itunes that is priced at99 cents to download a song and there is no monthly fee, but youmust own a Mac in order to do this. Sites such as mp3.com,peoplesound.com, and soundclick.com all offer free music todownload and burn. The catch is that these sites offer amajority of unknown artists and songs.

With the exception of the last few sites I have mentioned, youwill find a relatively large selection of music to choose fromin all of these sites. Not one of the sites offers less than300,000 songs to choose from with all of the biggest names inthe music industry such as Eminem, Britney Spears, and evenoldies such as Elvis, The Beatles, and Frank Sinatra.

There are websites out there that are 100% legal for you todownload music at. The question now is how much money are youwilling to pay to download all of the hottest songs today, andare you willing to pay extra to put those songs onto a CD?