Ask MeCha - music downloading I'm sure this has been asked and answered before, but I'm asking now, okay?→[More:]So, the wife and I have grown weary of not being able to immediately download any song that strikes our fancy, and we have finally admitted to ourselves (and the rest of the IP world) that we are ready to pony up and start paying for the "privilege". However, we are leery of some of the things we've heard about download services, and want to know what both what we'd be getting into, and what we'd be getting out of it.

Our requirements are few, but exacting:

1. We want to be able to have at our beck and call recent popular songs (example: today, she asked me "have you heard that song by Death Cab For Cutie? I kind of like that") as well as odd-ball things that strike our fancy (example(s): we frequently listen to a cappella and world music college radio, and often hear something that we would like a copy of).

2. We want MP3s. That's the format we know, and we don't want to have to deal with any others.

3. We want to pay a fair price for a song, but after we do, we want to be able to have the file for our very own, and to burn it onto as many discs or copy it to as many different devices (always for our own listening pleasure, of course) as we desire.

By way of contrast, we don't want to pay an outlandish monthly fee for a service from which we can download a set number of songs per month from a tiny catalogue, and which we can only listen to on a specific computer, on a specific day of the week.

Please, good people - what are our options, and your recommendations?