The cheapest ways to buy music online!

One online store has started selling songs for less than half the price you'll pay at iTunes!

With an hour-long commute into work, I don’t know how I’d survive without my iPod. The Underground isn’t much fun at the best of times, but it would be ten times worse if I didn’t have my music.

Thankfully I can just close my eyes and turn on my music. Suddenly the fat bloke with the sweaty armpit in my face, and the girl with the backpack smashing into me every time the train jerks become only the most minor of irritations.

And while I like to keep my iPod full with decent new tunes, it’s not exactly cheap to do so if you rely on iTunes, with many songs now costing 99p. Thankfully there are plenty of alternative online stores which offer far more competitive prices.

The new kid on the block

The new outfit having a go at iTunes is HMV Digital, which launched recently.

If you head over to HMV, you can download any of the top 40 singles for just 40p – less than half what you’ll have to shell out for singles from iTunes.

Songs from outside the top 40 will be priced 79p and upwards, still generally cheaper than iTunes.

The system has been built by 7Digital, an outfit that has previously won plenty of fans among the lovemoney.com readership. I’ve actually tried out the HMV system, and it’s pretty smooth – purchases are automatically transferred over to your iTunes library.

It’s certainly something I’ll be using again, though that really relies on music I want to own and listen to making it into the top 40, which is far from a given.

Sailing down the Amazon

A cracking alternative to using iTunes for me has always been Amazon, so it’s great that Amazon also offers the top 40 at 40p per track. What’s more, on the whole it also offers other songs at a better price than many other online retailers.

For starters, each week it offers a selection of tracks absolutely free. And it’s not like the artists involved are complete no-hopers – for example free tracks are available this week from Phil Collins, The Hoosiers and Macy Gray.

It also boasts a whole stack of tracks at 59p, as well as discounted albums. And like HMV Digital, it boasts a very smooth download system for syncing your tracks with iTunes.

Sky Songs

Sky Songs launched a couple of months ago, and offers quite a nice compromise between downloading music to listen to on the go, and the sort of streaming service that made Spotify’s name.

For £4.99 a month, users can download 5 mp3s, as well as enjoy unlimited streaming of the five million tracks in the Sky Songs library. You can then pay to download additional tracks or albums each month.

It’s a decent enough service, but in my view Sky Songs is  probably only worth going for if you spend a lot of time streaming music on your computer.

Spotify

 The firm that really first brought music streaming to my attention, and I’m not alone on this one, was of course Spotify. Spotify is a program which you install onto your computer and lets you stream the songs you want to hear, whenever you want to hear them.

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There are currently three packages available to new Spotify users. The Open package is absolutely free (though there will be occasional adverts in between songs), and allows users to stream up to 20 hours of music a month.

If you’re willing to shell out £4.99 a month then you get the Unlimited package. As the name suggests, you can stream as much music as you want, and you also manage to avoid the adverts, which from experience are some of the most irritating adverts ever made.

Finally, for £9.99 a month you get the Premium package, which allows you to listen to your Spotify playlists offline and on your mobile or iPod.

Play it again Sam

Play.com is not just a decent bet if you are after cheap DVDs – its online mp3 service is pretty good too.

The site offers a wide collection of tracks at 65p a go. That’s more expensive than the HMV and Amazon offering for top 40 tracks, but if your chosen song falls out of that category, Play might just be the cheapest place to snap it up.

Mflow

The last music firm I want to have a look at is mflow. This is an application which has really adopted the social media model, and actually offers users the chance to make a bit of money too!

Once you install the system, you can then ‘follow’ other users. These may be friends, or even some of the celebrities that have already adopted the system. Should you particularly like a song, you can ‘flow’ it – basically all of those users who ‘follow’ you will receive a message saying that you have recommended the track. Should they then purchase the song, you’ll get a cut of the fee they pay!

It’s a frankly brilliant concept in my view, but its success really relies on more people adopting the mflow software. With many tracks going for 79p, it still has a way to go before those who are happy using HMV, Amazon and the rest switch over.

Finding the cheapest track

At lovemoney.com, we live by the policy of shopping around before you buy anything to ensure you get the cheapest deal, rather than always blindly buying from the same store. Obviously, that can be a bit time consuming, so it’s terrific that there is now a website which will tell you the cheapest site to download a specific track or album from.

CompareDownload.com works just like any other comparison site really – type in the name of the song or track and it will tell you where you can buy it cheapest. It also shows you all of the music that you can get for free from various music sites, as well as rounding up some of the best music bargains!

These are my favourite music sites, but there are loads more out there. Why not share your favourites via the comment box below?

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