Emusic for indie stuff (provided you're willing to put up with a subsription based model) www.emusic.com

7Digital for everything else. http://www.7digital.com/

Why anyone uses iTunes is beyond me, it's horrible.

Thanks for that... most helpful indeed!

I tried 7Digital & they have an pretty amazing amount of stuff that I want or could use, but judging on the previews of the tracks, the sound quality is pretty awful... I've some near studio quality speakers & thru them, the previews sound like they were MP3s made in the 1980s - are the downloads the same, or if not does anyone know where I can get MP3s of quality enough to play thru a decent sound system that won't sound s**te? I'm desperate now - the party's next weekend!!! Cheers!

generally, the previews on these things are fairly awful. it's the same on amazon. I've downloaded individual tracks of www.tesco.co.uk. It's a few years ago but the sound quality was fine and they actually had a pretty good selection at the time. I got a good lot of very early REM stuff from there. the only problem is there's DRM protection on all the songs that you download, which means you can only download it about 3 times and you can only burn it to cd a certain number of times

Or you could always just go on limewire or www.mininova.org and download everything for free!

The previews are just that on any download site, not reflective of the quality of the actual MP3. I've found that on most download sites, the quality of the actual MP3 encoding varies from release to release. The only sites I've found you are guaranteed of really high quality would be sites like beatport.com which are aimed at DJs and offer the downloads in 320kbps or even the uncompressed .WAV format. Good quality, but pricey and limited to dance/electronic.

Of course you could just browse some music blogs and get all the music you'll ever need for free. Just sayin' is all.

On the day that it was suggested that Customs & Excise officers should have the right to search thru people's MP3 players for illegal downloads as they pass thru state borders, I find that statement highly controversial. It could even be implied that you are inducing people towards entrapment. Shame on you. I will fight against the party line by downloading all my music legally. Fuck the system.

3 things strike me about this.
1. Where did you hear this? I've been searching on news websites for ages (about 2 mins) and the only article i could find suggesting this might even happen was in the canadian sun was about 3 months ago.
2. What customs officer is actually going to search through every single detail of someone's hard drive or mp3 player. it may be possible that you get one who's bored and might throw his weight around but i can never really picture a customs officer saying "Dude, you've got the new Okervill River Album. That's not due out for another 2 weeks. That's it I'm hauling your ass in."
3. How will it be possible to distinguish illegally downloaded mp3s from straight cd rips or MP3s that the person has created themselves.

Might I suggest it was said in jest?

you know when you've been 'Belgraded

you people should know i have no sense of humour! especially when i'm hungover!

plus my boss in work is a conspiracy theory fanatic. i hear that sort of stuff said in earnest all day in here

Anyhow - that 7Digital site is class (cheers again for the tip, Binokular!)... the quality of the actual downloads is really good - I spent a few hours & over a hundred squid at the weekend! Everything form Julia London to N.E.R.D.

All I gotta do now is print off the e-mail reciepts & keep them with me as I cross international borders!