Buying music online can happen in one of two ways: You can purchase songs or albums individually (usually around 99 cents per song) and then they download to your computer and eventually you transfer a copy onto your device: Zune, Creative Zen, iPod, etc. There are also services that you pay a fixed monthy fee (usually around $15 to $20 a month) and as long as you maintain a subscription you can download as many songs or albums you want at no extra charge. If you do decide to stop paying for the subscription all the songs you downloaded through that service will stop being able to be played until you begin paying for the subscription again or just delete them.

My personal preference is still to just go to McKays or Borders or wherever and actually purchase a real CD. I appreciate having a physical object to represent my purchase. It’s something that can’t be deleted by accident or downloaded for free. I also like being able to appreciate the work artists put into designing the cover art and booklet insert. I still use a CD player in my car a lot and if I want to listen to songs that I’ve purchased while I’m driving somewhere, I’d rather have a nice, distinctive looking CD to pop in to listen to than a pile of CD-Rs that have a bunch of sharpie on them, or have to print out a nice looking CD label for every album I buy and have to stick them on all the disks. This, about equally as much as the fact that it’s illegal, is why I don’t just go download whatever I want off bittorrent or other file sharing networks.