Buying Music Online

A. Amazon.com - music CDs via mail order

A great way to look for books, music CDs, DVDs, etc.  Big selection and good prices.

1. Open your Web browser, click on the address bar at the top, type in amazon.com/music, and press the enter key.  (You can bookmark this site if you intend to come back later).

2. Look for the Search Music box on the left of the window.  Click in the "Popular Music" menu and select the category you're interested in (e.g. Artist Name, Album Title, Song Title, Popular music, Used Music, Classical music, etc).

3. Type in what you are looking for (it might be the name of the artist, album, or song title, or you could just put in the type of music, e.g. jazz) and click on the Go button. 

4. Albums matching your search terms will be listed in the center of the window in alphabetical order.  Scroll down to see all of the matches.  

5. Click the album title or the little graphic to display the album page. Scroll down on the album page to see all of the information, which includes a list of songs and reviews from editors and listeners.  

6. Many albums allow you to listen to samples of the songs on the album,  Scroll down until you see the "Listen to Samples" section.  Try clicking on the blue "Listen" buttons to the right of the track title; depending on how your computer is configured, one of these is likely to work.  You'll get a brief audio sample.

7. To buy the album, click on the "Add to shopping cart" button on the right.

B. Online digital music services - Buying music one song at a time

This is the new way to buy music: you download individual songs or whole albums to your hard disk, then burn them onto audio CDs or MP3 CDs using your CD burner. Individual songs usually cost $0.99 ea.  The advantage is that you don't have to wait for the US Mail and you can create customized albums containing just the songs you like, in whatever order you like. This is most practical if you have a high-speed Internet service (e.g. Cable or DSL) rather than dial-up. 

There are several such services listed in the "Digital Music Services" folder in "Sound and Music Web Sites" on the Digital Sound and Music CD-ROM.   Two of the best are Apple's ITunes (go to itunes.com) and Roxio's Napster 2.0 (go to napster.com).  Neither of these require a monthly subscription fee; you pay only for what you download.  Both use special software (not your regular Web browser) that is optimized for convenient browsing, searching, listening to samples, and downloading.  

C. Downloading free music

A good source of background music for multimedia slideshows, movies,  etc., is freeplaymusic.com.  They have hundreds of original music titles in MP3 format you can download for free, and you can use them for non-commercial educational projects entirely free of royalties. They have every style of music imaginable.

(c) Tom O'Haver (toh@umd.edu), March 2005