Amazon is probably the best other non-sub service. Emusic has terrific range, but you have to pay a monthly subscription and you get your choice of a set number of tracks. iTunes normally loads quickly, even on my phone, but it may have just been your connection was a bit slow. TBH, I would get my music mostly on CD, online prices are very low, and rip them into iTunes at a bitrate of 320Kb; the reason being, if you have a serious harddrive crash, you have hardcopy backups. There is software that will let you retrieve music from your pod as well. I point this out because computers can and do die, and having it happen with several thousand music tracks on is very upsetting. I lost over eight thousand tracks off my laptop trying to do something dumb. Fortunately I got them back off the pod. It may never happen, but it never hurts to be prepared. Oh, and Sky are now offering a music download service that works with iPods, the advert was on a couple of minutes ago.