What are the best websites, if any, for downloading songs? Also, how do you e-mail them to a friend?

itunes

I buy music from Amazon, which has no DRM protection, so technically, you can share the files with others, but this is probably illegal. I only share them with my wife, since we wouldn’t buy two copies of Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster.

iTunes doesn’t have any DRM either. I don’t think there’s a way to download a song to your computer legally and be able to legally share it with others unless the artist gave explicit permission to do so.

Yes, I have an iTunes account but that would not help with the sharing aspect of the question. Thanks, @gggritso, for your answer.

@janbb Sorry, I thought you were maybe having trouble with Limewire and viruses. I actually never tried to send a link to a song from my itunes account, but I thought one could do it the same way one links to youtube. Sorry if you thought I was trying to not be helpful. I was actually called away right when I was answering to begin with and meant to come back in a minute.

Emusic.com downloads are DRM-free as well.

As far as sharing the track, the only legal way for the friend to own the copy of a music is to buy it for themselves. You can, however, share the track for evaluation purposes only…meaning, your friend can retain the music for generally no more than 24 hours. As far as sending, you can attach an MP3 file to an email, speed of sending and receiving will vary depending on the quality of internet connection on both ends.

I really like Lala. Anyone can stream a full song once, but afterwards, you pay 10¢ to “unlock” it for unlimited streaming, or 89¢ for a DRM-free MP3. It’s completely legal; they have contracts with a lot of major record labels, and a claimed library of about 8 million songs. Super super obscure stuff is hard to find, but their selection is pretty amazing.

They also have a built-in URL shortening service, so you can copy and paste songs like this: http://lala.com/zDRc (that’s it, really.)