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Perhaps some music-crazy, computer savvy teen is spouting the latest lyrics of a band that sounds only vaguely familiar to you. Perhaps when you walk by your family’s computer, song playlists seem to be multiplying exponentially. Perhaps you yourself are fascinated by the world of mp3s, iPods, and downloading. The following are a list of legal downloading sites you may not have investigated. From the oldies-but-goodies to the brand-new, there is something for all musical tastes at a reasonable price—and without the fear of potential litigation from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Buymusic.com
From Limp Bizkit to Beyonce, to the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, Buymusic.com offers a great selection of artists—all for around $1 per song. Users can listen to part of a song before downloading and also click on different icons to see how many times you can transfer the song to a portable listening device or another computer, and how many times you can burn it to CD.

iTunes.com
Mac users, take heart. The downloading industry has not forgotten your needs. Apple’s itunes.com gives you more than 200,000 songs to download for 99 cents each. You can also sign up for “Free Music Tuesdays,” an e-mail bulletin that updates users on new releases and other freshly added songs.

Napster.com
The site that jumpstarted the controversy about illegal downloads has reinvented itself. In its newest incarnation, Napster offers songs for 99 cents and entire albums for $9.95 to Windows XP and 2000 users.

Listen.com’s Rhapsody
Listen.com’s Rhapsody is a streaming media service to which you can subscribe. Instead of downloading the song, you can listen to it on your PC (no Macs as of yet). Users can’t download to a portable listening device yet although that is in the works. For $9.95 a month, subscribers can listen to the music they want or even the radio; for an additional fee on a per-song basis, you can burn songs to CD.

Musicmatch.com
This site allows you to buy songs for 99 cents each or download most albums for about $10. You can burn them to CD or transfer them to a portable music player; however, Musicmatch.com puts the responsibility on you to find out how many times you can legally burn or transfer different songs.

Emusic.com
Though it offers artists that are not as mainstream, emusic.com offers a pretty sweet deal for listeners: unlimited downloading, burning and transferring. You can enjoy a free trial period with 50 free mp3s before formally subscribing to the service. Sign up for three months at $14.99 per month or sign up for a year at $9.99 a month.