Load This: Free Music

Itunes is great. Until the credit card bill comes. Converting your CDs to digital is awesome, but takes a weekend. Most music services have annoying or confusing DRM layers, or poor selection. BitTorrent? Sure, and take the risk of the RIAA launching a litigation grenade into your life. Sometimes it feels like music services exist only to frustrate the end user. Here's a few sources of online music that are legal, free or very cheap, and above all, easy.

1. Pandora

Pandora is the simplest way get to music you like on the web. Go to their website, type an artist, song title, or genre, and Pandora whips up a custom radio station for you. The web site is a little bit poky, but the user interface is easy. If you don't mind your browser sitting on a big Jose Cuervo ad, Pandora's a great find.

2. Slacker



Slacker builds on Pandora's custom radio project by adding a more robust menu system, but the free service is similar. Grab a paid service, and you request specific songs and save them to stream any time you want. Oh, and if you're a Windows user, you can download the software player so you don't have to keep your browser open.

3. Last.fm


Last.fm does everything Pandora and Slacker do. What makes it unique is scrobbling. When you load a Last.fm client (and there's one for just about every platform you can connect to the Internet with) and it records (scrobbles) every song you listen to with any media player. Last.fm uses this information to find more music you like. So instead of having to tell it what you want to listen to, it listens to what you're listening to already. It also suggests free mp3s and podcasts, and to be honest, it's got so many features, I need to play with it some more.

4. Lala

Lala is new, and I'm rooting for it. When you load Lala, it searches your computer for music you already own, and lets you stream it from anywhere. Want to buy new music? Fine. Either you can
fork over 50 cents per song (which is half of Itunes rates), or for only 10 cents, you can stream the song anytime you want. It's just getting started, but if their claims of a mobile port are true, this has the potential to be the killer music phone app.