You have heard of Itunes and Real Networks, there are other music vendors but none quite as unusual or cheap as a site called All of MP3. They are based in Russia and through some setup with the govt there they are able to legally offer a lot of full albums from known artists for free and a penny a meg for their VIP downloads. You don't have to give your credit card number to register, they also have a nice explorer type interface for selecting and downloading what you want if you wish to use it. The free stuff is encoded at 128k mp3 which is fine for any portable player.
http://www.allofmp3.com
Not like anybody around here would be buying music lol.. so you can reg for free and get a few albums to listen to..
Here's a page that links to some of the full albums, they limit you to 3 downloads at a time when you're getting free stuff, but what the hey.
http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3free.htm