Today is Tuesday and instead of blogging about new releases, Ben Brudevold-Newman (TIBA -- the intrepid blog assistant) came up with a better idea: a guidepost to places where you can't actually download the music, but you can listen to almost anything you want, whenever you want.

First, we recommend going to The Hype Machine. It's an "audio blog aggregator" -- something I've never heard of before -- which means it "keeps track of songs posted on the best blogs about music and presents them in an easy-to-consume manner."

Once you're there, search for what you want to listen to and then if you're lucky, you'll be able to click "listen" and generate a playlist from your search results. If you're looking for Jordi Savall, you're outta luck and need to click on the link to Amazon or iTunes.

Of course, the old renegade of the online music world, Napster, now has totally legal ways to listen for free to any song in their archives (up to five times -- after that, you have to become a member and pay).

But what's even cooler is Pandora, an offshoot of the Music Genome Project, which analyzed thousands of songs to discover their unique magical, mystical, musical "DNA." Now, for free, it can search for an artist or song and generate a playlist, which Pandora calls a "radio station" made up of similar songs or artists. It's not unlike what happens after you buy a few things on Amazon.com and they start developing little shopping lists of other things you might want to buy. But on Pandora you don't have to buy anything. What keeps Pandora in business is that on each song that plays, you can link to a site where you can buy it. But why would you if you can listen for free?

Here are some links to other cool free music sites, recommended by Ben: AllHipHop, Another Record, 3Hive, Karma Download, Rhapsody, Shoutcast, and Stereogum.com.