Then again, there's something about freebies that appeals to everyone, from the wealthy to the wannabes.

Here are several reasons to stay on the free sites:

• Plenty of free music is still available online. Although the recording industry went to court last fall to close the free file-sharing sites that arose to replace Napster, which started it all, the legal fight could drag on for years. And even if some of the existing file-sharing sites close, others likely will pop up to take their place. "It seems like it's a Hydra," said Bruce Haring, author of "Beyond the Charts: MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution." "You chop off one head and another takes its place."

Free sites such as KaZaa (kazaa.com) and AudioGalaxy (audiogalaxy.com) are reporting record traffic. But if you visit them, be advised it is illegal to download copyrighted music from them. It's hard to tell what has and hasn't been copyrighted on the Web, but the rule of thumb is that if it's new, it's probably copyrighted and you're breaking the law if you download it.

• Fees on top of fees. When you buy a CD at the mall, you pay once and the music is yours. But at pay sites you pay over and over. For instance, MusicNet charges $9.95 a month for 100 streamed songs and 100 downloads. But at the end of the month, your songs expire. What's more, you can't burn them onto a CD. Having to pay each month to get access to songs, on top of paying for an Internet service provider can add up quickly.

• Complicated rules. Pay sites often have confusing rules about what subscribers can do with the music once they have downloaded it. MusicNet lets customers download songs, but you can't burn the music onto a CD. Pressplay lets users transfer music from one computer to another, but you only can burn two songs from any one artist each month. Listen.com (listen.com) has a $9.95-a-month service called Rhapsody that lets customers get as much music as they want, but they can only listen to the tunes on their computers. One of the few pay sites critics praise is Emusic (emusic.com), which lets subscribers download as much music as they want and transfer songs to portable players. Such flexibility is key if pay sites want to survive, said John Hedtke, author of "MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution."

"If I am buying music, I would like to have the right to play it again and again," he said. "I would like to be able to use it pretty much as I see fit."

• Limited availability. Pay sites offer tens of thousands of songs by various artists, but you still have to subscribe to several sites to get the variety of music you want because of partnership agreements. For instance, MusicNet has a deal with the Entertainment, EMI, Warner and Zomba music labels, while Listen.com works with Sony Music Entertainment, BMG Entertainment and EMI. If you subscribe to MusicNet and you want a Michael Jackson tune (only available through Sony), you'd be out of luck because Sony is with Listen.com. This confuses music fans, who tend to follow artists, not labels.

Right now, the world of online music is still wide open.