In an unprecedented case of deflation, the cost of music has plunged to less than it was half a century ago. Last week Amazon, the online retailer, began selling a selection of 100 of its most popular music downloads for 29p a track. That is cheaper than Lonnie Donegan’s single My Old Man’s a Dustman, which was the Easter No 1 in the 1960 hit parade, when the 7in vinyl record cost 6s 2d — equivalent to 31p in new money.

The latest bargain prices might have brought a wry smile from the late Donegan, but the fact that music is less expensive than when he topped the charts is no laughing matter for contemporary artists, who are watching royalties evaporate. The flipside of pain is gain, though, and what’s bad for artists is good news, at least in the short term, for music buyers. Thanks to the internet, they now have unprecedented choice and easy access to cheap music.

Amazon’s discount offer is widely seen as a brazen stunt to draw attention to its fledgling music-downloads store and draw buyers away from the Apple iTunes service. At the end of 2008, Apple was estimated to have more than three-quarters of the UK’s music-downloads market. Now, the world’s biggest supplier of download tunes is rattled.

Last week it finally abandoned its rigid pricing structure and introduced a sliding scale, in which songs can be bought for between 59p and 99p, rather than a flat 79p. Despite the price cuts from the big music retailers, however, the real competition is from free illegal downloads and new services such as Spotify, which allows listeners to select tracks and play them for free.

Does this herald an era of cheap-as-chips music downloads? Probably not, though an Amazon spokesman insisted: “There is no scheduled end date for this pricing.” The bonanza is limited to a modest number of tracks and can’t last indefinitely for reasons of economics: the margins on singles sales are slim, even at 79p a track, so either Amazon is heavily subsidising these prices as a loss-leader, or it has struck spectacular deals with the record labels.

Price, though, is only one part of the appeal of any music-download service. For years, music lovers have been bemused by a range of file formats and usage restrictions that have left them unable to play tracks they paid for on the hardware of their choice. For example, if you bought a song on Apple’s iTunes, you would be able to play it only on an iPod or a specified computer, not on a rival MP3 player. Apple has recently dropped these restrictions, and many other large retailers, including Amazon and HMV’s online store, have started to sell music downloads as MP3 files playable on any device. The downside is that MP3 files are of inferior sound quality.

The other key area for customers is the shopping experience. Online music stores can be bewildering and hard to navigate. Apple has long been a market leader in this respect, but Amazon’s recently launched download service is almost as good. It includes a service that recommends artists similar to the ones you’ve bought, and offers user-generated reviews plus easy downloading. All the sites have hugely expanded their catalogues, offering customers an unparalleled choice of new music.

Despite the best efforts of the legitimate download sites (such as Apple and Amazon) to cut prices, improve usability and increase choice, they face an uphill battle against illegal filesharing. The market analyst Forrester Research says that last year British customers of legal music download stores bought an average of 26 tracks each.

“Many people still tend to use legitimate music services to cherry-pick individual tracks that they can’t find elsewhere or that they know they definitely want,” said Mark Mulligan, the firm’s research director. “The evidence suggests that while consumers nibble at the wares of the legal services, they will go on to fill their hard drives with illicit bounty.”

Top of the shops

There are about 50 legal music download services in the UK (British customers are barred from using many non-EU stores because of licensing regulations) and prices can vary significantly. So too can the choice of songs available, the sound quality of the downloads and the usability of the service. So which are the best? We went shopping for last week’s No 1 single — Poker Face by Lady GaGa — as well as her current album, The Fame.

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