Shocker?
I'm new to the music download thing, any enlightenment? reliable sites, copyright protection coding, do/don'ts?
I'd like to download a "master copy" to my pc and then copy to phone, flash drive, etc. More than willing to pay, the musicians deserve as much. The CD market is drying-up, understandably, and it's hard to find decent music in the stores...
thanks!
I use Amazon and iTunes, usually whichever happens to be cheaper on a given song or album. Most of the time, at least in my experience, the pricing is the same. But often enough Amazon is a cheaper and occasionally iTunes is cheaper. They have different special deals at different times. If they have the same price on something I usually use iTunes because I buy iTunes gift cards for 20% off and always have a balance loaded onto my account, so everything I by through the Apple (digital content) stores is effectively 20% off the listed price. I'm not sure if it's easy to find Amazon digital content cards at a discount, but it wouldn't surprise me if you can find them as well. I think buying stuff through the Google store would work just as well.
At this point you shouldn't have to worry about copyright protection. I'm not aware of any such stores that still have DRM (Digital Rights Management) on the downloaded files for stuff that you buy. (Some of the subscription services still use DRM-ed files so that if you cancel your subscription you can't just keep all the music you downloaded.) And the file download format probably doesn't matter much to most people. Apple uses AAC which is a little bit more efficient encoding format than MP3 (which I think Amazon uses), particularly at lower bit rates. But the difference is something that won't matter to most people and in most circumstances, not now that most downloads are at a fairly robust bit rate (256 kbps +). So beyond price, the only thing that really matters is what apps you would be using to download or otherwise access your purchased music. Once they're downloaded, as you suggest you'd be doing, it shouldn't really matter where you got them from. For instance, even when I buy stuff from Amazon it is automatically added to my iTunes library and iCloud Music Library and if I want I can immediately re-download it in AAC format from just as though I'd bought it through iTunes.
If you use iTunes or are okay running it on your computer, then I'd say have accounts with Amazon and Apple (and maybe Google if you want) and buy stuff from whichever has it cheaper. If not, just get an account with Amazon and buy stuff from them. There won't be much stuff that you could have gotten cheaper elsewhere, and there won't be a whole lot of (semi-popular) stuff that you won't find on Amazon that you could have found elsewhere. There will be some. I've found some stuff on Amazon but not on iTunes and some stuff on iTunes but not on Amazon (more often the latter), but it isn't much popular or semi-popular stuff. And frankly, as the iTunes software has tried to do more and more stuff it's gotten less efficient and less stable. So I can understand some people preferring to not run it. Amazon's music download app is more dedicated, not as bloated. And you don't even have to use it in order to download from their store, you can download stuff through a browser window. They will suggest that you download and use their app though.
For most people I think it comes down to what ecosystem they're more comfortable with. What kinds of devices do you use? If you don't use any Apple stuff, then buy stuff through Amazon and/or Google. Like I suggested, once you've bought and downloaded the music it doesn't much matter where you got it from. And they all let you re-download stuff later on through their cloud services. When you buy something you basically get a check mark associated with your account (on their servers) that indicates that you own that particular content, so from then on you can download it for free - the best I can tell, as often as you want. It's always best to keep a backup copy on a hard drive or something in case something gets removed from the company's store, in which case you won't be able to download it again.
If you have specific questions or something doesn't make sense, feel free to ask.
