This is a battle that has been raging for several years. It comes down to this: would you rather buy your music or rent it (taking downloading it illegally out of the equation)? Here’s the breakdown of each service:

With over 3 billion downloads, iTunes is the king of digital music services. One reason iTunes is so well liked is that it allows music buyers to buy both singles and albums at a lower cost than CD’s. Singles are $.99 or $1.29 for select tracts that have no DRM-protection. This means that most songs you buy off iTunes will NOT work with any mp3 players except for iPods. Albums are usually $9.99, although select albums may be more or less from time to time. Lastly, music videos and TV shows cost $1.99 and movies are $9.99 – these also don’t work on any video players except iPods.

There is a clearance section selling albums that’ve been on the e-shelves for too long; this is one of my favorite places to buy music. Not sure if iTunes music will work with your computer? There is a free single each week that you can try to make sure the quality and compatibility is acceptable.

Lastly, there are many “podcasts”, or downloadable audio or video content that you can subscribe to for free. This section is worth checking out even if you don’t have an iPod.

Napster also offers downloads for $.99 per song, but is really known for its subscription services. For $9.99 per month, you’re allowed to download as many songs as you want onto 3 computers. If you wish to transfer these songs to a compatible mp3 player, you’ll have to pay $14.99 per month instead for “Napster To Go”, allowing you to transfer as many songs onto your player as you can fit.

What’s the catch? The songs downloaded from the subscription service stop working if you stop subscribing. Still, for the cost of filling the capacity of a 30 gb iPod with iTunes store music, you could subscribe to Napster for over a century. Also, you can use Napster on multiple computers, whereas with iTunes you have to manually transfer your downloaded music: you can’t download your purchases more than once.

Bottom-line

As it stands, iTunes has a slightly bigger selection and much bigger customer base. Its prices are better than buying CDs, but the main issue is the songs only work with iPods. Napster is a good alternative for non-iPod users, especially since you can still buy songs at the same price as on iTunes and they’ll work on most non-iPod players. Not convinced? Napster has a free trial so that you can check if its catalogue is to your liking and whether your mp3 player is fully compatible – in fact you SHOULD try it before subscribing just to make sure everything works.