I went on a mission trying to find the best place to download music for the holidays, and found some sites naughty, others nice. Now that iTunes has many competitors, I looked for the best deal. Overall, it was a frustrating experience. My poor computer endured many random uploads, and now all these programs are fighting for control of my hard drive. I just hope I didn’t get a virus. I picked one song as a test.

It was a single I thought I wouldn’t get tired of hearing over and over: “Is There A Ghost” by the Sub Pop group Band of Horses. Then I attempted to download it from nine major sites. My credit-card company is already calling, thinking some crazy hacker loves only one song. Comparatively, iTunes is still the easiest to use. Amazon comes in second.

Its downloads (at 89 cents) are cheaper than iTunes (at 99 cents) and the site is so easy I accidentally clicked on a random Christmas single and bought it. Sub Pop’s new digital store would rank third for usability, but right now the store only offers full albums. Rhapsody, Zune and Yahoo also have downloading services, but their main deals are subscriptions. As a music lover, I’m used to owning my music, so these services took some getting used to.

In theory, it would be cool to listen to as many songs as I wanted to for the cost of an album a month, but for better or worse it’s like cable. You have to pay that price forever if you want to keep listening. Once you stop, those songs are gone. You might as well stream songs on your computer for free. Some of these companies (eMusic, Yahoo, Rhapsody and Napster) wowed me with their free downloads.