Hi - I am clueless about downloading music - what's legal to download, where to download from, what kind of equipment I have to have. I am pretty good with computers, but have never tried this. Can anyone help me please?

Thanks!

Lesley

Hmm it's hard to tell what is legal and what is not. Anything that is free,probably isn't legal.

Legal sites:

Napster
Yahoo Music Engine
iTunes (the only service compatible with iPods)

(I'm sure there are others, but those are the first ones that come to mind).

The first two offer a subscription music service (Napster's is called "Napster2Go") which sounds pretty neat - basically you pay a subscription fee and you can download as many songs as you want into your player without having to pay for each song. However you have to have a compatible subscription player to use this feature!

We subscribe to Napster and Yahoo - I favor Napster as they have more songs and is easy to search, but Yahoo is pretty inexpensive at $60 a year. If you just want to download songs to put on your MP3 player or burn to a CD, you can subscribe to Napster Light for free and just pay 99 cents a song. We have the regular Napster subscription, upgraded our computer's speakers so we can listen to tunes in the house via Napster.

Here is what I have been doing lately, I pick up cd's from the library and upload them to the computer. Saves a ton of money!

Paying for it is legal.
Paying for it through a company you know like Yahoo and iTunes is more than likely the best route to go.
It does get expensive after a while...but it's worth it. That way you'll know you aren't downloading illegal or virusey stuff.