Throughout the past few years downloading music on the internet has increased in popularity. At the same time though, it has become illegal through many companies to download music as musicians and artists have been losing money on their CD sales. With many people being sued in the past couple years for downloading music, is it really possible to download music legally anymore? If so, at what price will it cost you to download music?

As music sites such as Napster and Kazaa and many more have attempted to create sites to download music for free, they have just increased the problem that much more. Some of the users of these programs have learned the hard way that music does not come free, as they were sued for illegally downloading music.

Today there are many sites in which you can download music at where they claim it is 100% legal. The latest music file formats used are Windows Media (WMA), Advanced Acoustic Coding (AAC) and Atrac 3, and are very popular as it increases the sound quality making it closer to an actual CD bought in stores.

Another great advantage is that many sites such as SonicSelector Service on MSN allow you to preview the music before buying it. Many sites today also offer a three-day trial of their music downloading site, and then after that you will have to begin paying a monthly fee. So it is possible to download music legally online, but at what cost?

Pressplay.com offers unlimited music for a price of $9.95 per month and then you also have to install the software from their site. The downloaded music is non-burnable and once your subscription runs out you no longer have access to any of your songs. Rhapsody at listen.com also charges $9.95 per month for non-burnable music, but instead of downloading the music you download a music player that gives you access to the songs.

Now you can download music and you know the basic price per month for non-burnable songs. However, most people download music so that they can burn their favorite CD with a variety of songs. Transferring these songs onto a CD or a personal MP3 player will cost you even more. Many sites offer packages for songs capable of burning as oppose to a set price per song.

For example, Pressplay offers 5 burnable songs for $5.95, 10 burnable songs for $9.95, 20 burnable songs for $18.95, and then on top of those prices you are still required to pay the monthly fee to use the program. MusicNet offers a package for $17.95 a month that comes with unlimited downloading music and 10 burnable songs.

There are other sites such as apple.com/itunes that is priced at 99 cents to download a song and there is no monthly fee, but you must own a Mac in order to do this. Sites such as mp3.com, peoplesound.com, and soundclick.com all offer free music to download and burn. The catch is that these sites offer a majority of unknown artists and songs.

With the exception of the last few sites I have mentioned, you will find a relatively large selection of music to choose from in all of these sites. Not one of the sites offers less than 300,000 songs to choose from with all of the biggest names in the music industry such as Eminem, Britney Spears, and even oldies such as Elvis, The Beatles, and Frank Sinatra.

There are websites out there that are 100% legal for you to download music at. The question now is how much money are you willing to pay to download all of the hottest songs today, and are you willing to pay extra to put those songs onto a CD?