20,000 Channels of Music Online? Legal? And Free? Welcome to Mercora

Tired of listening to the same old top 40 tunes on your radio? Want to do something with all that Internet bandwidth available on your computer? Don't want to deal with buying new music until you have really listened to it? Feeling guilty about making copies of your friends' MP3 files? If you answered "yes" to these questions, we've got great news.

Mercora is designing a new music streaming service just for people like you. And the really great thing is that the service is free - for now, at least - and 100% legit.

I know many of our readers have made use of various MP3 peer-to-peer file sharing services to expand their music libraries - as have some of our editors. But until now none of these services have been completely legal, because users are copying each other's songs across the Internet. Before you send me that e-mail, let's take a look at what Mercora is offering.

I had a chance to spend some time with two of Mercora's executives in their offices last week. They gave me a tour of their service and walked me through the concept behind it.

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