You can purchase music legally from many of online sources, but which one is truly the best one for you? In this article I will be explaining the differences in each of the online music retailers and my thoughts on each one. I will be talking about iTunes, Amazon and Google Music. I see these 3 retailers as the main source of online music retail, and are completely legal because you have to purchase them and you own them.

Online music sharing got off to a rocky start with the invent of Napster in early 1999 by Shawn Fanning, it was a great way of sharing the music you already owned and ripped into your library on your computer. Napster was doing very well until it was sued by Metallica and the RIAA which caused Napster to be shut down and Shawn Fanning to be sued personally for infringing on copyrights on  multiple accounts. Since Napster Shawn Fanning has had his hand in a few other start up’s which you may have heard of. He helped Mark Zuckerburg get into even more colleges when The Facebook was launching and becoming famous with college students, and now Shawn is a part of Spotify and is trying to change the way we listen to music online, albeit legally this time. After Napster rose to fame Apple with the help of Steve Jobs introduced the iPod and the iTunes store, where you would be able to get all of your music for the only mp3 player you needed at the time. Fast forward to today, and there are many of types of music consumption devices, from mp3 players, cell phones, computers, tablets and many more we have so many choices how we can consume the music we like. On 12/1/2011 Napster was sold to Rhapsody by Best Buy who tried to make it an online music re-seller, but failed at it.

I will be describing 3 of the major online sources to purchase your music, yes I know there are countless ways to get your music free (this may be covered in another article) but today I am talking about legal methods to consume music. To display the differences in each store, I am using the same music album from the same artist to demonstrate the differences in each store. Rihanna “Talk That Talk”

iTunes has this album for $21.99 15 Songs and a bonus booklet

Amazon has this album for $10.99 14 Songs with a bonus booklet

Google Music has this album for $12.49 14 Songs with NO bonus booklet

What the price actually comes down to is the contract the music vendor has with the artist/label. Amazon has the lowest price on this album at this time, but they tend to run promotions more often than any other of the online stores. So I tend to shop Amazon for all of my music purchases due to this fact. I usually only purchase my music when it is on sale. Amazon is notorious for selling their albums for $5.00 while iTunes never does this.