Q: What's the problem with online music stores?

A: DRM

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, but some have chosen to refer to it as Digital Restrictions Management, because DRM actually restricts the rights of the user. To understand DRM, consider your typical MP3 file. Once you have the MP3 file on your computer, you can do whatever you want with it (by this, I mean it is physically possible for you to do anything you want; whether or not these acts are legal in your country is a different matter): You can listen to it as often as you like, you can send it to all your friends, you can burn it onto a CD, you can make a copy of it and thus have two MP3 files with the same contents, etc.

Some music vendors don't like you having all this freedom, so they've device a format with DRM built into it. Windows Media File has DRM support, as does Apple's iTunes format, among others. Using DRM, the music vendors can pretty much apply any arbitrary limitation they want on your usage. For example, perhaps they'll let you copy it to a maximum of 3 computers, and only burn it at most once to a CD. Perhaps they won't allow you to send it to your friends at all. They might even restrict the number of times you can listen to the file (for example, if it's being provided as a free sample to download).

DRM isn't limited to just music formats. There is a large effort right now to create DRMed video formats, and even to apply DRM to software! Imagine having a DRMed version of Microsoft Office, for which you'd have to pay $24.99 per month, or else the software uninstalls itself.

These restrictions are enforced by the actual hardware devices (e.g. the computer, or CD player or DVD player, or the actual televisions and speakers themselves), and so they cannot be circumvented simply by entering a keycode you might find online or running a cracking program. You'd have to either build your own computer/DVD player/television set without incorporating the DRM system, or find someone who will build it for you and sell it to you. Finding someone to do it for you, or finding information to learn how to do it yourself will be difficult, because obviously the media giants are lobbying to make building non DRM compliant devices illegal.

DRM in and of itself is not "evil", just like a gun itself is not evil, though it can be used for evil. It's just that DRM doesn't really make sense: Most consumers, if they understand what DRM is, want the non-DRMed version of a product whenever possible. Would you pay $20 for a "traditional" music album which doesn't restrict your actions in any way, or $18 for a DRMed music album?

Buying DRMed albums just to "support the artist" usually doesn't make sense these days either. Many artists have expressed that they'd rather have people listen to their music than get rich (obviously, not all artists feel this way, and so you should probably consult their homepage to see what their stance is on the matter, and purchase your albums accordingly). Worst yet, many artists, when using major labels to distribute their music, get less than 50% of the profit. Some figures I've heard are as low as 15% of the profits going to the artist, with the rest going to the label and the retailers (and a minor percentage going to the manufacturing factories).

Enter MP3tunes.com. They give you plain old MP3s, with no DRM whatsoever. Why? Because pirates are ALREADY distributing MP3s illegally all over the Internet. The people at MP3tunes realize that DRM just hurts the consumer, without actually significantly stopping piracy. They charge 88 American cents per song, and $8.88 USD per album. And of those 88 cents, 60 cents goes to the artist (that's about 68%, for the curious). When you create an account with them, your account keeps track of all the songs you've purchased. So if you accidentally delete all your songs, you can re-download the ones you've already paid for at no extra charge.

The bad news is that you won't find "mainstream" artist here. That means Eminem, Britney Spears, and the like. The good news is that every song on MP3Tunes.com has a 30 second preview that you can download for free, so you can be sure you'll enjoy the song you're purchasing.