Foo - Legit music download sites - whose best?

Hmm. I guess that should be "who's best." Anyhow...

I'm a dinosaur... buy the CD and rip from that... So I know squat. I want to buy a gift certificate for friend that downloads tunes. I'm told the only pre-requisite is that they have songs that say muthaf*cka. Any suggestions for best services, or services to avoid?

Thanx,
Roadbuzz

I sometimes use the new Napster. It's $.99 per song and they have a good selection. I know you can get gift cards for it somewhere, but I'm not sure where. You can probably look that up on napster.com. It's very easy to use and the downloads are pretty quick. I haven't had any problems with it at all.

One great free service is Furthur. It allows you to download and share whole shows. It's really nice and totally legit because all of the material has been taped from shows and is allowed and encouraged by the bands. I'm not sure what type of music you or your friend is into, but I get a lot of Grateful Dead and similar bands' shows from there.

I always just buy the CD at the store and rip it (I mean, why not have a hard copy of it, just in case?), but if I was to buy online, I'd just use iTunes.

I always just buy the CD at the store and rip it (I mean, why not have a hard copy of it, just in case?), but if I was to buy online, I'd just use iTunes.

That's what I do, usually. After purchasing Velvet Revolver's CD, however, I'm afraid trouble is a-brewin'. My bank has less security than this CD. Sure the songs are all ready to load on your player(as long as you use WMA), but I couldn't find ANY way to convert them to MP3. Luckily, my player supports WMA. Pissed me off, tho....

BTW, I've tried i-Tunes, too. It's pretty cool if you just want a couple songs by an artist, but I'm pretty sure it's more cost effective to buy a CD based on price/song. Fortunately for me, I tend to like all the songs on my CD's or none.

Epitonic.com has some good legal downloads that are put up mostly by up and coming bands for exposure. Mostly in the indie genre.

I've been looking for a site without proprietary file-formats available for some of the major performers and haven't found one. It would at least be nice to get one-hit wonders since those are the groups I just want a couple songs from. Napster, I-tunes, Bestbuy, Walmart, all the others I have found that have artists I'm familiar with use a format that supports digital rights management, so they are able to limit the number of times you copy the file. I'm not satisfied with that kind of limitation. I will only buy music if I'm free to use it in a way that's convenient for me. I guess right now that means buying the CD's and ripping them myself. I've found several sites like the one gonesh suggested, but I'm not ready to look into new groups until I've collected more of the stuff I know and like.

You say your friend downloads? Do you mean he does P2P and you're trying to steer him in the legal direction or is there a service he already uses? If so, it seems as simple as finding out what service it is.

I only use the iTunes Music Store for my downloads.