One grouse that people might have is if they purchased a song or album online only to discover that another store was offering the same track for a lesser price. That’s where the Mp3StoreGuide can be a real boon. The brainchild of the Mp3Tunes creators, the site is basically a way to check online store prices and find out which store if offering the best rate.

Stores are grouped into three categories; those that carry major labels, minor labels, and stores offering subscription services. Each store has information like average price, song bitrate, country of service, whether the store offers free tracks, etc. Mp3StoreGuide offers users the option of searching each site individually or doing a comparison search.

To test the website, I did a search using both popular and indie artists. A search of U2’s ‘New Years Day’ yielded 67 results while a search for ‘Heaven’ by Hail Social threw up 25 results of which some results were of other songs. Not bad, if I might say so.

For buyers of music online, Mp3StoreGuide is a gem. It’s fast, easy to use, and gives results. The bonus is that the site displays only DRM-free song results. Moreover, the source code is freely available to users who might want to modify it to suit their tastes.

What do you think of the Mp3StoreGuide? Do you like it? How do you think the site can be improved? Let me know in the comments.

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Till now, YouTube was a place only for watching videos. Still, with other sites getting their act together, it was only a matter of time before these guys pulled up their socks and took a look at the services they offer.

What am I referring to? Well, the next time you’re watching a video and decide you like the song that’s playing in the background, you may just be able to purchase the song for your own music collection. YouTube has begun providing Amazon and iTunes links for videos.

These ‘click-to-buy’ links are YouTube’s way of making it easy for users to purchase something they like. And it’s not limited only to music. In the case of video game related videos like trailers, a link to buy the game will be available.

As of now, download links are available only for partner videos i.e. content uploaded directly by companies (EMI, for example). Also, this feature is currently available only in the United States but that should change soon.

This is a pleasant surprise from YouTube. One instant bonus I can think of is that it makes it easy to identify the artist and song name for an unidentified video. What do you think about YouTube’s click-to-buy service? Any other advantages or disadvantages you can come up with? Let me know in the comments.

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There’s nothing wrong in wanting to beat iTunes. However, the way Nokia is going about things, you’d think they were trying to scare away all their customers. It’s a case of how do I frighten thee? Let me count the ways.

Let’s start by getting to the site. I accessed the site using Firefox and was told that the music store does not support the browser. You can only get to the site using IE6 or higher. That’s strike one. To transfer the music to your phone, you need to have Windows XP or Vista. That’s strike two since it shuts out all the Linux and Mac users.

Assuming you fulfill the first two criteria, the fun doesn’t stop there. Music on the site is only available in the proprietary ‘wma’ format, so your phone needs to have Windows Media Player to play your tunes. At $1.70 a song, it might interest you to know that the songs are DRM enabled as well. So, you cannot play the song anywhere else except for your phone.

In my first para, I mentioned Nokia was looking to topple iTunes. Their most brilliant strategy to do that? The songs cannot be played on iPod. That’s right, the most popular portable media player will not play any of these songs. Brilliant marketing strategy isn’t it?

To quote Andre Yoskowitz at Afterdawn, “I’m not sure who at Nokia thought that offering expensive, DRM-crippled music that cannot be played on iPods was a good idea but they should not have a job.”

How many of you would be willing to purchase music like this? What do you think of Nokia’s marketing strategy? What’s your opinion on these kind of arm-twisting tactics? Let me know.

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Songs bought on Lala can be played on your iPod which makes Lala pretty unique as of now. Lala also has its own music player that can go through your entire digital music collection and upload whatever songs are missing on the site to its own library. This makes your songs accessible to you whenever you are logging in from a different computer.

Much like lastfm, Lala also allows you to create your own playlists and share them with other users. The best thing about Lala is the preview feature. While other sites offer a preview of only a few seconds, Lala actually lets you listen to entire albums. The idea is to entice listeners to go ahead and purchase tracks for their iPods or computers after they are done.

Lala mostly supports independent artists but there are quite a number of mainstream ones on the site too. This is thanks to its tie-up with the Warner Music Group. To listen to songs, you need to signup, which is pretty easy.

I don’t know of too many other sites that let you listen to complete albums. I think this site has great potential though. What do you think?

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