Though at a snails pace, the music industry is transitioning away from physical media like casettes and CD’s and towards a entirely online distribution system. It makes sense – if you have a decent Internet connection you can listen to music right in your browser. No need to drive to the record store and waste your money on a physical disc. And if you really want a local, offline copy, you usually find and download a MP3.

The above paragraph sounds enticing, no doubt, but how does it work in practice? In this article I’ll show you several ways to listen to music online. And don’t worry – you won’t need to download files and bother with converting them to a format that your computer will know how to open (for example convert flac to mp3). Most online radio sites don’t even require registration.

First up : Pandora.com. Pandora is a US-only Internet radio service. It uses something similar to a genetic algorithm to find out what your band/style preferences are and supplies the audio stream via an easy-to-use, flash-based player. You will need to register to start listening to Pandora, but registration is free. The only major downsides are that it won’t work for anyone outside of USA and you don’t have direct control over what tracks are played.

Deezer.zom is another free Internet radio/search engine. This time you don’t even need to sign up – just enter an artist or song name in a search box and start enjoying the tunes. Deezer also includes many social community features (these require registration), a news section and the ability to easily buy the playing track should you want to peruse it when your connection is down. The download functions is aimed mainly at iTunes users, but you can always convert FLAC to MP3 without much hassle if you want to use it with other players.

Lastly, Last.fm is my personal favorite. It’s another “smart” online radio that will automatically construct a playlist based on songs you like. Unlike Pandora, it has no country restrictions. You can also install a stand-alone Last.fm player which means you don’t need to keep your browser open to listen to music online. Last.fm also includes numerous social networking features. For example, it automatically finds users with similar music tastes and lets you add them as friends.

Well, that concludes this short overview of online music portals. There are a lot more similar sites out there, but these three should be enough to get you started.