I was a Yahoo Music subscriber for a year and it was a great service to get as much music as you wanted for 5 bux a month (paid a year in advance). I REALLY liked how you could rate music, build your own personal radio stations (similar to Pandora but you had even more control over what you heard). But of course, after canceling my subscription I had no access to the DRM files (wma) I had downloaded (it's 15bux a mo to allow those files to play on a portable device).
I only bought one album out right from them (79 cents a song or ~8bux an album)... in the same way you would from itunes. I thought/think it was COMPLETELY rediculous that a song I bought OUT RIGHT would still have DRM tied to it. I vowed to never do that again. Completely retarded and the RIAA can eat me.
Enter
eMusic (wiki). True you have to have a subscription to get X number of downloads but depending on the plan you get the songs can be as cheap as 27cents each. They are real MP3 files encoded with LAME at pretty good bitrates, much higher quality than most other music stores. I just subscribe for a month, buy some songs/albums then cancel it till there is something else I want. If you like Top40 their selection may be minimal but for the stuff I like, there is tons on there. I've very happy with it. Oh, if you keep an active subscription you can also redownload your songs as many times as you want. I don't know of any other music service that allows that. Great so you don't have to backup your files if you are lazy as you can just go get your songs again and again.
