Find the Cheapest Music at Mp3StoreGuide

Digital music has come a long way. From just one or two portals, the present scenario has an innumerable catalog of stores offering music completely legally and at a reasonable price. Digital music is not without its pitfalls though, most notably DRM. Still, most online stores now offer DRM-free music, which is great news.

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.

Update: The website is no longer available. We have removed the link from the article. There does not seem to be a comparable service available on the Internet right now.