Music Now was first established by Circuit City and purchased by AOL in 2005. In 2007, Napster purchased the AOL Music download site. Songs on the site come in Windows Media Audio format, compatible with almost all music players except iPods. You can choose to buy individual songs; you can also take advantage of Napster's unique free streaming online music service, but each track can only be listened to three times. Buying a subscription on music.aol.com gets you unlimited listening on a PC. Napster To Go allows you to download songs to a compatible non-iPod MP3 player for $15 per month.

AOL Music is a great choice for those who work on multiple Windows-based PCs. The service is browser based, so getting your favorite songs is as easy as logging on. The best part of music.aol.com is that it features custom playlists and community features such as viewing and sharing music profiles with other visitors. To get the most out it, you need to spend some time browsing through the selection and making up your own playlists of favorite tunes. If you're a subscriber, you can access these playlists from any Windows PC (the service doesn't work on Macs), which is a pretty neat feature. Besides the personalized playlists, music.aol.com also offers radio suggestions. The more you log onto the service, the more it learns your preferences. One downside of using the AOL Music service is that listeners are surrounded by familiar tunes that they know and love, but the lack of editorial reviews and listener feedback, leads to a situation where you are not discovering new music and that, after awhile, can feel pretty confining. Music.aol.com also offers more than 2 million songs from the majors like EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Groups, as well as over one hundred independent labels. AOL Music.com is sort of light on the Indys compared to other services. Also, it doesn't offer gift certificates, an allowance system, parental controls, podcasts, or audiobooks. As noted above editorial content is sparse and exists only in the form of hot lists and community features are somewhat lacking---you can browse a few users' playlists but only the few that are posted. The AOL Music download site also offers more than 80 radio stations, but they're grouped under music-genre pages, not listed altogether on a radio page. Lastly, the subscription fee for AOL music downloads is on the pricey side.