I want to support the artists who make the music I love, but I don’t have a lot of money and I don’t like to support any of the labels under the RIAA. I also hate DRM.

Amie Street is my favorite way to get music. They have lots of fantastic music (Cat Power, Interpol, The New Pornographers) and its easy to find new music you might like. The prices are amazing, ranging from free to 98 cents a song. Price is based on how many people have purchased the song – the more people buy it, the higher the price. If you recommend a song and it gets more popular, you get money to buy more songs. Plus, there’s no DRM and artists get most of the profits:

Artists collect 70% of the money from each song after it has made $5. The first $5 of each song covers our storage, bandwidth, and transaction costs for that song. This one-time only charge is deducted from your first royalty check so there is no risk: you only have the $5 deducted after you make it.

My second favorite way to get music is on lala. This service makes trading CDs easy. You make a “have list” and a “want list” and lala sends you shipping materials. You get an email when someone adds a CD from your “have list” to their “want list.” Then you mail a CD. There’s a points system, so you receive about as many CDs as you send. Every trade costs $1.75. I’ve shipped 44 and received 47 CDs since December 2006. One of the things I like best about lala is that you never know what CD you’ll get next! I really love surprises.

My last resort for buying music is to get it used off of Amazon. I do this only if I can’t get it through lala or amie street and/or can’t wait for it to ship on lala.