Boogie on over to the Internet

The online music scene is exploding. It just needs to be discovered. Here are some Internet links to help you find the music you crave:

Online radio

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology radio list wmbr.mit.edu/stations/list.html shows links to more than 8,000 radio stations from Minneapolis to Melbourne. Each station has a Web site and many of them also broadcast over the Internet (look for "Bitcasters"). You can search by area or station.

Other players are also moving into Internet radio, notably Spinner.com (www.spinner.com), Broadcast.com (www.broadcast.com), and Yahoo! (radio.yahoo.com), the Internet search-engine company. These sites hint at the future of online radio. Instead of broadcasting a single stream of music, they offer various channels of entertainment that listeners can choose from.

Online music purchases

If you're interested in buying CDs and want to do it from the comfort of your own home, boogie on over to one of the online retailers. Larger ones include Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) and CDNow (www.cdnow.com); a smaller retailer is SoundStone.com (soundstone.com and www.rock.com). You can listen to sound clips before you buy.

Online music downloads

Several sites let you download songs directly to your computer, often for free. These sites call themselves music services or music hubs. Tunes.com (www.tunes.com) offers rock, hip-hop, and alternative songs and also runs the downloadable music site from Rolling Stone magazine (www.rollingstone.com). Classical music and jazz lovers should try Global Music Network (www.gmn.com), which offers lots of background on the music as well as the downloadable files.

Ultimately, the Web is about choice. If you know what music you want and simply want to know where to download it, search for it directly.

Besides running its own online radio service, the Lycos search engine boasts the largest site (mp3.lycos.com) of downloadable songs in the popular MP3 format. Be careful, however, that the music you take doesn't infringe on copyright laws.