So apple has a new music downloading service coming out, and I'll be interested to see if it catches on. It seems that it is a buck a song, and you're allowed to have a copy of it up to 3 computers at once, but I think you're not allowed to burn them... This still doesn't sound like it will work. In order for me to switch from Kazaa to a pay service the pay service needs to offer me more than the free service. This shouldn't be difficult, if the record labels follow along with it, then one should be able to get a wider range of songs more dependably from the pay service than from Kazaa where you're at the whim of who happens to have the music (for example, it took me a month before "you're nothing without me" from the musical City of Angels had enough sources online to download it), however, the service needs to also let me do all of the things with that file that I can do with an mp3, most importantly I need to be able to make mix cds to send to friends. Without that I think any pay service is going to fail. I would like to pay for music, I really would. And a dollar a song is not unreasonable. I would pay for that, if there were good selection and no copy control. As it is I think I'll still be forced to stEAl.

[Steal: to take without permission. Steel: an alloy of iron and carbon (n); to strengthen (v.t.). --Ed.]

UPDATE: This article suggests that the service does allow burning... If this is the case then I might use this service when it hits PCs.

UPDATE: This article has better info: "Songs from the iTunes store can be transferred freely to iPod players, burned on unlimited numbers of CDs and accessed on up to a maximum of three Macintosh computers. Each song in Apple's store can be previewed for 30 seconds at no charge. It is currently available only in the United States." Looks pretty reasonable. A dollar is a tad steep, but I'm making real money these days, so I think I will probably start using this when it comes out for PC.