This is really good news for everyone! If you’ve ever had to restore a crashed disk or tried to copy and play protected music tracks from one media device to another you quickly found out that you were out of luck. In the case of a hard disk crash, well, your music and your money were history.

Pricing for music from the iTunes store will come in three levels. The lowest is 69 cents, the middle level is 99 cents and the highest level is $1.29. Apple made this agreement with the record labels in exchange for selling their music free of copy protection, also known as DRM. All 10 million songs on the iTunes store should be available in this format by the end of the 1st quarter.

While this may sound unique to many people it was actually done the 1st time by Amazon. Amazon made a similar agreement with record labels in 2007. As I have posted before Amazon also offers free downloads of selected individual tracks and albums. Hence my loyalty to Amazon.

I would imagine that iTunes probably made this move to better compete with stores such as Amazon. After all wouldn’t you rather have the freedom to play your music on whatever media that you prefer? If you are a loyal fan of the iTunes store however this is good news for you. Now you get flexible pricing and the ability to play your music on any device that you want and even copy it to several devices to fit your lifestyle.

Isn’t competition great?

-j

Some of the songs are singles and some are complete albums. There is all kinds of music here, some by well known artists and some either by not so well known artists or artists using a different name. The thing is that you can find some real jewels in their free lineup. You may have to do some trial and error listening but I can assure you that they are there.

A couple of my most favorite albums are This-Is-How-I-Roc-2008-Label-Sampler, Vice Gives You The Gift Of Good Music, and Fitzsimon & Brogan/Songs of Love and Revenge. You can listen to them on my site here or on Amazon’s site.

To get started go to Amazon’s website and in the left hand column slide your cursor to Digital Download>MP3 downloads. Scroll about a third of the way down and you will see a section called Special Deals: Free Songs and MP3 Albums as Low as $4.99. Read the text below the Album pictures and you will see a reference link to free gratis jams.

Click on that link and scroll to the bottom of the page to start looking at the gratis jams. Some will be singles and others are albums. If you want to see all 600+ in columnar format on the right hand side of the page find the link that says Top Free Songs See over 500 more free songs and click on this link. Once I am here I like to sort them either by Album Name or Artist Name. I like to do the album name as many of the albums contain various artists. Sorting them by Artist Name helps me find tunes that I may be missing from some of my favorite artists.

Once you find what you are looking for click on the Get MP3 in the left hand column. A page will open prompting you to install the Amazon downloader. This is available for Ubuntu 7.10, Debian 4, Fedora 8, OpenSuse 10.3, Windows and Mac OSx.

Happy listening!

-j