The Internet offers three main services that provide us with the access to audio recordings — online shops, online radio and audio hosting service.

Online music shops

iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple Inc. By January 2009 the store has sold 6 billion songs that makes the service the largest legal music retailer in the world.

The cost of one song in US iTunes is 0.99 US dollar; the cost of one album is 9.99 US dollar. In iTunes in Europe the cost of one song is 0.99 Euro, the cost of one album is 9.99 Euro.

Till December 2008 all music bought in iTunes Store had the add-in defense mechanism and could not be recoded by standard tools into other formats. In December 2008 Apple announced the new standard where the defense against copying was removed. Now all tracks in iTunes Store are transferred into new format without defense against copying.

Звуки!  у is Russian music news website and online shop. The music collection is rich enough: 260 thousand MP3 songs of 20 thousand different music bands and singers. However in contrast to iTunes Store it looks much poorer. The average price of the song is about 15 roubles. For paying one can use online payment, including Yandex.Money and Webmoney.

There are a lot of online music shops that are not available if you have Russian IP-address. For example, one of the most convenient MP3 downloading services provided by Amazon was available only for users in the USA for a long time. On 3, December 2008 Amazon MP3 started in Great Britain and on 1, April 2009 — in Germany.

In Wikipedia you may find a catalogue of Online music stores with detailed descriptions of 92 online shops.

Music online radio

Last.fm is an Internet radio and music community website founded in 2002. Every month about 30 million users listen to Last.fm. The web site offers more than 7 million songs and works with 280 thousand labels and singers.

On Last.fm every user can choose songs and recommend them for listening. Here you may listen to any already existing radio station or you may form your own radio according to your music preferences. As its programmers say the peculiarity of Last.fm is that you get an opportunity to get acquainted with people who love the same music. On Last.fm you may also install your music player in order to listen to the music.

All services are still free. Recently company management has announced that starting from April, 1 2009 users except those who live in the USA, Great Britain and Germany should pay 3 euro every month for the full access to the site. However this decision was postponed.

Another popular Internet-radio Pandora.com is now not available in Russia.

Audio hosting services

Audio hosting services allow individuals to upload files including songs to an Internet web site and give links to them for downloading. These services usually use web and FTP access. As a rule there is no search for songs and in order to download the song you want you need to get the direct link from the user who uploaded this song to the site.

zSHARE offers three tariffs in order to get access to the site: Premium members, Members, Non-Member. To become a member is enough to register on the site. To become a Premium member it is necessary to make a payment. For Premium members 365 days cost 30 US dollars. In this case ads are not shown, the speed of downloading grows significantly. The highest possible size of the file can be 2 gigabyte. (For Non-Member it is only 500 megabyte).

Rapidshare is one of the most popular web sites. Its total speed of Internet exchange is 240 gigabytes, the site has 5,4 petabyte of users` data. Paying clients do not have any speed limits. They have 500 gigabyte to save their data.

Music.lib.ru is a free audio hosting service in Moshkov`s library. There are about 4 millions songs on the site. Almost all these songs are uploaded by their authors. Each author has his/her own page.

Music for free

There is a lot of music for free on the Internet but it is not very easy to find. Its amount is not large so it can suddenly appear and likewise disappear. Thus on some occasions it takes us too much time to find music for free. Sometimes it is not reasonable.

There are exceptions, however. For example, website belcanto.ru uploaded free and legal classical music recordings appeared till 1971. That is till the moment when the USSR signed the Copyright Convention.

Here are some analogous sites:

clms.by.ru is a site where you can download a lot of good MP3 classical compositions.

classicalarchives.com is a site of classical music. It demands registration. Registered users can download not more than five files per day.

All Bach in MP3: zipsites.ru/music/bach

Piano recordings of famous pianists: artofpiano.ru.