A list of legal sources for online content is maintained at Educause: Legal Content. A summary of legal alternatives for downloading or otherwise acquiring copyrighted music is available at Why Music Matters website developed by Music Biz Association and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Legal music sources
- Amazon's Digital Music Store contains over 20 million songs for as little as $0.69 and full albums for download from $5.00 and up. Amazon Prime Music offers over a million songs and hundreds of playlists for no additional charge to both Amazon Prime and Amazon Student Prime members. Students can become Amazon Student Prime members for $49 a year to gain access to both Prime Music and Prime Instant Video streaming. Downloaded material will be securely and automatically stored in Amazon Cloud Player for free.
- Apple's iTunes Music Store offers the downloading and streaming of music and podcasts. Downloaded material can be copied to as many as five PCs and an unlimited number of iPods. iTunes also offers a number of free songs as well as free radio streaming.
- Beatport PRO is a secure and legal way to download high-definition electronic music. Music can be downloaded in MP3, WAV, and AIFF formats on a pay-per-download basis.
- eMusic is a music download service that offers music to non-subscribing users and discounted prices for members. eMusic specializes in independent music.
- Rhapsody (partnered with Napster) offers multiple levels of service. The RealPlayer music store allows you to purchase and download or stream music from a variety of devices.
- Google Play is Google's online store that offers music, video, books, and magazines for purchase or rent. It provides applications for different android devices.
- Pandora is a music streaming service that plays songs from stations based on the user's selection of artists, songs, and/or genres of music. Users may create their own stations by selecting by an artist(s) or by song(s). The user refines the collection of streamed songs by providing positive (thumbs up) or negative (thumbs down) feedback in response to the tracks chosen by the service. The service offers a free subscription supported by advertisements and a fee-based subscription without ads. Pandora also includes comedy tracks. Pandora is available on mobile phones, tablets, e-readers, in some makes/models of cars, and on a variety of home audio and video appliances.
- Free Music Archive (Beta) is a library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by WFMU.
- Spotify is a music streaming service with content that may be searched by artist, album, title, genre, playlist, or record label. Spotify users can quickly and easily share playlists with their friends through social media, email, and SMS text messages. Spotify's free option is supported by advertisements; the premium version is ad-free, allows tracks to be skipped without limit, and permits downloading of music for offline listening. Spotify may be played on mobile and tablet devices or your computer. For more information see the Spotify help page.
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Legal movie sources
- Netflix is an online video streaming service with movies, television shows and documentaries.. It requires a paid subscription.
- Hulu is an online video service that offers TV shows as well as movies. It requires a paid subscription.
- Amazon Video offers movies and TV shows for purchase or rental on your computer, Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles, PlayStation 3 & 4, Wii, TiVo, Roku, or other portable video devices. Amazon Prime Video offers thousands of movies and TV shows for streaming. It requires an Amazon Prime subscription. Student rates are available.
- Apple's iTunes Store offers thousands of movies to buy or rent. iTunes also offers the purchase of TV shows as standalone episodes or season passes.
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Center for Democracy and Technology
The Center for Democracy and Technology has compiled a list of websites that "sell" access to music that is not legally obtained. Please be sure to review this list before giving money to any website offering "legal" downloads. Customers have come away with the impression that a fee payment legitimizes downloading. The fee, however, is only for a faster version of the software, or other software features (speedier searches); it has nothing to do with shielding users from responsibility for copyright infringement.
If you have information about another legal resource that you feel we should include in this list, please email us at nethics@umd.edu.
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