As you may already know, many people don’t pay for their music (at least not like they did before, anyway), this doesn’t mean that they pirate it though (through torrent sites etc.,), it just means that many people have moved to services like Spotify, which you pay £5 or £10 per month for (depending on your plan), to have a huge library of music “streamed” to your computer. You can then make them available offline (effectively downloading music). This is useful if you listen to lots of music and download more than around 10 tracks a month, otherwise iTunes could be cheaper (at 99p a track). Spotify will not actually save an MP3 of a file, but you have to run an app (available for Mac, Windows, Android, Windows Phone, iPhone etc.,)

When you pay for spotify, you get high bitrate music (high quality basically), but there are other options that offer the same quality. One is a YouTube converter – downloader which allows you to download an MP3 of a YouTube video and as most songs are on YouTube, you can get nearly any song. The problem is that the quality isn’t great, but don’t panic because there is a fix – iTunes match.

iTunes match is a service from Apple, newly released in the UK. Its use is for upgrading your music you bought from iTunes before it had high bitrate tracks and then sharing it to all of your devices by storing the music on Apple’s servers. The brilliant thing is that you can put a downloaded file from YouTube that is bad quality and has badly written metadata and swap it for the version in Apple’s library with perfect metadata and a high quality. It is $24.99 in the US and £22 in the UK.

Both options above are perfectly legal, so hopefully you will be able to save some money with these services; they are not quite as convenient, but a lot cheaper than iTunes.

What do you think? Comment below