I'm always surprised at the reactions I get when I talk about online music. Thoughts of pirates, the RIAA and trials seem to be conjured whenever I dare same "internet" and "music" in the same breadth. To me, the internet is a great way for bands to expand there listener-base. Whether your a big band or a tiny one, the internet is an amazing tool for distributing your music.
I've always have an MP3 player full of tunes to listen to, but I find myself turning to online sites more and more. I'm finding a variety of new music that's often free, and always legal. Here are a few of my favorite sites for finding music.
Jamendo
I've mentioned it before, and it's because I love this site! All of the content on it is licensed under creative commons which means it's at least free for you to download and distribute. There's a great variety of stuff from Ska to Blues, and a lot of quality musicians post to it.
Cherry Peel
If your familiar with social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit, the concept of Cherry Peel should be familiar: submit entries and have users vote those entries up or down. The result is a refined list of user chosen music that changes on a regular basis. Whether your just looking for something to listen to, or you want to get into the community, Cherry Peel is great. I'm a huge fan of the links to iTunes, so I can support the bands I listen to.
The Internet Archive:Audio
The Internet Archive's audio collection is full of public domain works ranging from vintage to modern. It's great to find clips for school projects, presentations, remixing, or just simple listening.
Pandora
By giving Pandora a little information about your musical tastes, it will do its best to generate a playlist that mirrors your likes. You can setup multiple channels for different styles, and improve Pandora's accuracy by giving each new song a thumbs-up/thumbs-down.
Favtape
Favtape helps you create "Mix Tapes" online from a variety of sources. many of the songs are pulled from Youtube so there's a wide variety of unknown and popular music. Favtape is great for linking to music from blogs and other websites. My biggest complaint is that it's grown so popular it has frequent downtime.
Podcasts
National Public Radio puts out a variety of Podcasts every week, my favorite being the This American Life Podcast These podcasts are great for car-rides or just to sit back and listen to.
These sites aren't very likely to give you songs you hear on the radio, but there's a diverse audio collection out there, just ripe for the picking. And who know, maybe you'll be listing to the next big thing!