This is not an attempt to advocate illegal music downloads. As a matter of fact, I am going to discuss why you might be able to satisfy most or all of your music needs via free and legal means.
Over the last two years or so, many music-related online services have cropped up, many of them free. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to infer such free services will have some kind of limitations in terms of access or functionality. Of the ones I am going to talk about next, the limitation is that you cannot choose the exact song to play. This means my solution is not going to work if you must decide the next 10 songs you will listen to, but if all you need is some music that suits your taste, it is not a bad way to do it, especially given its cost.
The first such service I ran into is the popular Pandora. This neat service will play songs that are musically similar to a song or artist you nominate. You cannot choose the song to play, or skip too many songs in a short period of time, but you can finetune your "station" by giving songs a thumbs up or thumbs down.
Another service I have recently discovered is the AOL Radio, which plays XM radio stations. I believe XM radio is a digital radio service in the United States but it really doesn't matter here -- you just get music for free! I was actually able to find an anime and Japanese pop station, so there should be a station for everyone. Here you only get to choose the genre and there is no opportunity for finetuning the station. Occasionally you will be subjected to audio ads, but that is tolerably infrequent.
The next one is not really an online service -- it is your plain old FM radio station. Of particular interest are the community stations. These are not-for-profit radio stations that relies on volunteer and donations (I would expect they get some Government support as well) for their operations. What sets them apart from commercial stations is the lack of ads and a more diversified selection of genres. Because they do not need to maximise profit they can move away from the mainstream stuff and have programmes say in foreign languages. The other point I want to make is online radio. For me this means I can listen to Hong Kong radio in real time, therefore getting the latest in the Canto-pop scene, which admittedly is on its way down.
I find that these three types of music services can satisfy my music needs most of the time. If I am after English songs, I can turn to Pandora and AOL radio. This works for me because I don't really have any favourite bands or artist so a genre is good enough for me. If instead I feel like some Chinese programming I tune in to HK radio streams. As with everything else in Hong Kong, when a new song arrives it creates much hype and is played hourly, but in a matter of weeks another batch of new songs will arrive and the "old" songs are soon forgotten. So at its height a new song gets played so often I can always listen to it without downloading the song, and by the time it is phased out, I am "done with the song" and will have no desire to own it.
I am not saying there are no exceptions to the above. I am a loyal fan of The Corrs and have bought all their recent CD albums. Occasionally a good Canto song will also warrant a CD purchase. However, 99% of the time I can live happily on free, radio-style music services. I don't have a lot of control over what I listen, but that might actually be a good thing. Try it and you'll see what I mean.
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