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It's easy to get into a musical funk. No, not funk music such as James Brown or George Clinton, but rather listening to the same old scratched CD again and again, playing out the battery on your MP3 player or getting only one radio station in your car. It can be a frustrating existence listening to nothing but the same kind of music.

Cue the Internet.

Searching for music on the Internet can be a daunting task if you don't know where to look, but a few sites out there are set up specifically for the goal of helping people find new music that suits their taste.

Pandora

(www.pandora.com)

The offspring of The Music Genome Project - an endeavor started in 2000 to categorize thousands of songs - Pandora is the prime example of online user-specified radio. The site allows users to enter an artist, and using the data from eight years of cataloging songs, the Web site matches the user with other songs and artists of similar styles. For example, a search of The Beatles brought up the Fab Four's song "If I Fell" followed by The Who's "I'm One," The Kinks' "Get Back In Line," and Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Just A Song Before I Go."

The site requires a user to register after listening to a few songs, but the registration process is free and requires only an e-mail address and the answers to some very general questions. After registering with Pandora, you are granted 100 different artist radio stations - the radio station plays music similar to the artist you list - and the ability to share stations with friends. If you want to subscribe to Pandora's $36-a-year service, which disables advertising and allows you to stream music to selected media players, you can, but the additional benefits really don't seem to warrant the cost.

Musicovery

(www.musicovery.com)

Musicovery combines the emotions inherent in listening to music with a way to navigate through songs and artists using those emotions. The site has two main options for choosing music: Mood and Dance. Within either category, there is the possibility of narrowing the search by picking and choosing from 20 genres of music or selecting all at the same time to get a wider sampling. Navigating with Mood allows you to pick how you are feeling on the spectrum of moods, which include Dark, Positive, Energetic and Calm. For instance, with the cursor placed toward the Dark and Energetic quadrant of the emotion map, Musicovery displayed songs by U2, Metallica, Joe Cocker, Oasis and Led Zeppelin. Using Dance to select and explore music lets you pick the tempo of the songs you want to listen to, again using the genre selections to narrow the field. Once a search is initiated, 10 to 15 songs will be brought up on the screen and intertwined in a graphical illustration.

Napster

(free.napster.com)

Since it stormed onto the online scene in 1999, Napster has undergone a series of transformations. It has changed from its groundbreaking, rebellious roots to a legitimate online music mall comparable to iTunes. After the original iteration of Napster was shut down by the courts in 2001, the music sharing site rose from the ashes in 2003 as a subscription service called Napster 2.0 after being purchased by Roxio. Today, one of Napster's services includes Free Napster, a Web site that allows visitors to stream many of the songs available for download on the subscription service. The service updates weekly with new releases, and songs that cannot be fully streamed still are available in 30-second clips. Browsing through Napster's online catalog of music lists the artists and also gives a listing of similar artists - ones that you've heard of as well as ones you haven't.

The Internet contains never ending sites boasting new music and up-and-coming artists, but these three are a good place to start for your journey of musical exploration.