I’d like to be able to listen to an entire song–or several songs–before deciding whether I will purchase a given CD. My M.O. to date has been to click on Amazon.com and listen to 30-45 second snippets, but that’s pretty cumbersome and hardly definitive.
Are there any free sites on the net that will serve my needs?
Most of the songs I’ve previewed there are full-length.
A couple of months ago, napster.com began allowing people to listen to any song or album it has up to five times for free. You have to register, but it allowed me to listen to some stuff I hadn’t heard in a while.
It’s called a “radio”. 
Although they’re geared mostly towards promoting new talent, such an independent artists, cdbaby.com and soundclick.com let you listen to full songs.
What if you want to find out if the other 10 songs on the album aren’t crap?
If they weren’t crap, they’d be on the radio too. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but those are few and far between.
Seconded. This is what I came in to recommend.
I just ran several jazz selections through their search function. Zero results.
Apparently, if you’re not mainstream, this site isn’t the best place, no?
Eh, it has a fair amount of non-mainstream stuff, but maybe just not jazz
Yahoo Music Engine - not free but only $5.00/Month
Unlimited listening to whatever you want - extensive library (including non mainstream)
Jazz is a whole different genre from what this site does. The best thing to do for jazz is to find a store that specializes in jazz and ask the guy behind the counter. He’ll probably put the disc on, plus another one that you’d like.
By the way, have you always had that exclamation point?
allofmp3.com is a Russian site. In all likelihood, it is rather illegal. For example, they have a nice Beatles collection despite the fact that Paul, Ringo, the estates of George and John, and Apple Records have not licensed any Beatles songs to be sold online. Legality aside, absoutely none of the money goes to the artists or their labels. You might as well use a filesharing system (I’m not advocating this; buy the CD already!) and you save money and the artists come out exactly the same. The only reason to use allofmp3 is to make yourself feel better that you paid someone for your music so that it’s somehow “legitimate.”
You could use my unorthodox method of buying CDs at a local music store by artists you’ve never heard of simply because you like their cover art. It’s worked well for me, but YMMV of course.
Only when I’m talking to pretty girls at a bar.
badda-bing!
Or, you know, for what this thread is about–listening to a full-length preview of a song before buying the album.
Touche. They’re still almost definitely illegal and certainly unethical (IMO), though.
As long as you don’t buy it from allofmp3.com after you preview. They clearly aren’t giving any money back to the artists.
I got the impression that the OP wanted to preview songs before buying the physical CD.
You could try the Music Genome Project, also known as Pandora. Put in the title/artist of the song you want and it will use their algorithms to find music which is “similar musically” to the track you like. If you create a “station” you can pull it up and usually the song you want is in the rotation. You are allowed to skip a few tracks, so if you pull up your “station” you can usually hit skip a time or two to get to the actual song. A side benefit of this is you could also find other stuff you’d like or other songs by the same artist/group.
Pandora is free(and legal to US residents), at least for now.
Enjoy,
Steven