The Mossberg Solution has a good primer on digital music.
Over 50 million Apple iPods, and lots of competing digital music players, have been sold by now — as well as over a billion songs and tens of millions of videos, since legal media sales took off a few years ago.
But many folks — even some who own iPods and other players — are still confused over how legal digital music works. So here’s a quick-and-dirty guide to the digital music world, in question-and-answer form. We’ve included the questions we are asked most frequently, plus a few other topics.