Do I always have to buy songs from the iTunes store?

I'm going to buy an iPhone and I'm an android user. I was wondering if I will always have to 'buy' songs from the store or can I download it or transfer it too? Please help. Is there a different method of adding songs to your IPhone?

If you have, for example, an mp3 collection of songs, you will be able to add them to iTunes, you just have to get them onto the iPhone's hard drive, that's the slightly tricky part… No convenient USB ports…
You could transfer your songs to Dropbox or some similar cloud-storage service, and then download them to your iPhone, for example. So yes, you can download songs from wherever and add them to iTunes (mp3 is ok, other formats might not be…).

You can illegally download them on your PC and then connect your iPhone to the PC and transfer the songs, or sync the iPhone.

If you already have mp3 files then just add them to your itunes song list and copy to the phone, I do that all the time.

No. You have to put them on the iPhone through iTunes but they don't have to come through the iTunes Store. A common misconception of iPhones.

If you have CDs for example you could rip the tracks using iTunes & sync them to the iPhone.

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