Amazon like brother Thin_J has said. Welcome to the church of Foobar. Here is your complementary weasel skull.

Yep. Sometimes independent bands will give you the option to buy it from a different source(myspace[blech] or their website), though.

And I'm not sure what rhymes with "mole-bleak" but I'll assume it's illegal and move on.

Amazon's MP3s are very good. If I could get lossless tracks with CUE sheets, so that I could create CDs for my own use, I'd buy most or all of my music there.

If they got it down to $5 a CD or so, the question would change. Instead of 'am I going to buy music this month?' it would be, "how much music am I going to buy this month?"

Danke my friends, Danke.

You could always use something that rhymes with "torrent." I only suggest that because it sounded like you wanted to fill your player, which, implies a great deal needed in a short period of time.

I've used the Zune marketplace some and that was fine. They give out a lot of their music as WMA though.

Amazon is probably going to be the least hassle.

I have many problems with things that rhyme with torrent, all of them technical, so Amazon is the best bet. And consider I just managed to cross about 15 songs off my "music I heard in Guitar Hero I/II/III or Rock Band and thought was awesome", and it was totally hassle-free, they have earned my business.

Likewise! I've been subscribing to eMusic for over a year now and I really enjoy the service. It's not always the place to go when you know exactly what you want, because it may not have what you're looking for, but it's definitely a great way to find new stuff you'd probably never have heard otherwise.

Full albums go through the software, individual songs are just straight downloads.

Napster.

I know this probably wont make me popular and I don't know if you can use it with other devices, but I've been absolutely loving the Zune marketplace. 15$/month for all you can eat. If your technically savvy enough you can get around the DRM, or you can just buy the DRM free versions of the tracks.

The new 3.0 zune firmware lets you download anything from the marketplace strait from the zune itself.

As a music junky, I use that function all the time. Its rad at parties when someone asks if you have X and you walk over to your zune and a minute later you have the whole album..

If you don't mind spending a little time ripping, Simply Audiobooks is the Netflix of books-on-CD. They also do digital downloads, but I have no experience with that part of the service.

Very happy with the CD service though. Been using it for a couple of years (although I'm considering dropping it, 'cause I tend to listen to a decent number of podcasts nowadays...)

ITMS DRM isn't that bad, actually. Just burn it to a CD, then rip from the CD. Use a rewritable and it's that much easier, not to mention you can do all of that within iTunes.

The only way anyone would really notice that loss is if they're an extreme audiophile. Otherwise, you're decompressing to a CD, then reencoding/compressing to your format of choice; you can even go back into the original ITMS format without the DRM.

Of course, which MP3 player you bought will dictate some of your options. Having tried Rhapsody To Go twice now, the lack of high quality large capacity players is still a deal breaker. They did have a lot of comedy and spoken word tracks as I recall.

Have you heard much bad about Audible? For books, you might try Librivox. But as RangerRick hinted at, there are tons of podcasts to fill that time as well.

Before switching to Simply Audiobooks, I used Audible, and I was pretty happy with it. Only reason I switched was price; I was perfectly happy with Audible's service, and their selection is huge. It's just cheaper to get SAB and there's no DRM when you rip CDs, so it won out for me.

That said, I seem to recall that iTunes uses Audible for their content, so whatever selection you have at Audible, you'll have at iTunes. (Googled) Hmm, looks like Amazon bought Audible.com so who knows if anything will happen to iTunes whenever that contract runs out. I can't imagine Amazon turning down money from Apple, it's just another sales channel to them, but.... Between the two, choose your DRM poison, I guess.