janabeil01: These Cheap Online Music Stores Make iTunes Look Like A Joke (AAPL)

Friday, 3 June 2011

These Cheap Online Music Stores Make iTunes Look Like A Joke (AAPL)

itunes cat

When the iTunes Music Store was unveiled to the world eight years ago, it was a big deal. Songs were only a dollar each. Most albums only ten dollars.

It was more or less the only game in town for legal music downloads.

Now there are other stores out there with catalogs that rival iTunes in size and absolutely destroy it in terms of price. You can easily grab an entire album for less than a dollar. With prices this low, why bother stealing music at all?

Let's look at each store using a metric called ROCI (Radiohead's OK Computer Index). Each store's ROCI is the cost of OK Computer -- the lower, the better.

7digital is under the radar

7digital offers more than 13 million songs to its customers. Odds are good that they have the one you're looking for.

ROCI*: $8.99

*The Radiohead OK Computer Index reflects the how much it costs to buy Radiohead's OK Computer at each store.

Amazon MP3 is a proven winner

You can already buy any album you can name from Amazon, and the company has almost as many albums available for immediate download from the Amazon MP3 store.

ROCI*: $7.56

*The Radiohead OK Computer Index reflects the how much it costs to buy Radiohead's OK Computer at each store.

eMusic has a large catalog available as a subscription

eMusic operates on a subscription basis. Starting at $11.99 each month, you can download 24 tracks from its impressive catalog per month -- 50 cents per song. With a more expensive subscription, the price drops to 42 cents per song and you get to download more songs each month.

ROCI*: $6.00 or less, depending on your subscription

*The Radiohead OK Computer Index reflects the how much it costs to buy Radiohead's OK Computer at each store.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

For the latest gadget news, visit SAI: Tools. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

See Also: