By Jennifer Toomey
Special to The Washington Post

For a record-store fanatic, the physical act of flipping through alphabetized racks and hearing the dull click of shrink-wrapped CD cases is half the pleasure of purchasing. But for the rest of us, who'd rather listen to music than shop for it, record stores are just a means to an end, and there's no reason why that has to involve driving to the mall.

Purchasing CDs online may be a bit less thrilling than the rare, fantastic record store experience, but the entire process takes five minutes. You'll have sufficient lunch-hour time left over for, well, lunch, and in a week you'll experience the old-fashioned pleasure of snail-mail packages bearing silvery discs.

The three main competitors for your online music buck are CDNow http://www.cdnow.com, Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com and Music Boulevard http://www.musicblvd.com. For shoppers who already know what discs they want, these sites' differences are negligible: All are easy to use; present links to reviews, articles and audio clips; and offer similar shipping and payment options. The sites also tend to promote the same releases: Titanic headlines the main page, Liz Phair is spotlighted on the indie-rock page, Lauryn Hill heads up the "Soul/R&B" section and so on. All three sites stock from 300,000 to 500,000 titles each, compared with the 50,000 or so titles available at a typical Tower, Borders or Best Buy. Like fast-food chains, on a functional level, they're interchangeable – and brand recognition is in the details.

The big detail worth noticing is the background information each site provides about the records it stocks. Here's where Music Boulevard, my favorite of the three, pulls ahead. As a little-known artist myself, I was impressed with its detailed bios of other little-known artists. The site's reviews are long, knowledgeable, critical and often drawn from smaller music journals like Puncture. Music Boulevard is also not shy about posting negative reviews of titles – a gutsy move, considering that scathing commentary on a disc can have the same effect as a store clerk rushing up to you and knocking the CD from your hands.

By comparison, CDNow's at-a-glance reviews are backslaps, akin to the positive blurbs in movie ads; its longer reviews are drawn from Rolling Stone and CMJ (College Music Journal, a trade publication with a proclivity for ultra-positive assessments).

Amazon.com employs its own staff of critics to review releases, a newish arrangement; the vast majority of its reviews remain excerpts from commercial mags like Spin and Rolling Stone. Amazon fills out its review section democratically by allowing customers to post their own critiques alongside the critics. It's a technique that works particularly well with divisive artists like Milli Vanilli, since it allows the professionals to wax pejorative while fans can respond with defiant praise.

Should a review not be enough to help you decide, all three sites offer 30-second sound bites, normally in the ubiquitous RealAudio format. Music Boulevard also uses the MPEG format, which allows you to save the samples on your computer, and Liquid Audio, which can be used to purchase and download songs directly onto your computer's hard drive. These three sites also feature computer-generated shopping advice, based on your previous music choices; results were erratic, with Amazon suggesting at one point that, since I like the space-rock instrumental band Tortoise, a Phil Collins CD might also be a worthy addition to my collection. It's heartening to see that certain functions of a good music store still can't be approximated through computer formulas.

All three sites offer discounts on top-selling items, but generally the prices stay within a buck of each other – and of what you'd pay at an offline store. In rare cases a CD was drastically less expensive at one site – for example, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville cost only $6.98 at CDNow, against $9.99 on Music Boulevard and $9.49 on Amazon. The next CD I checked, Yo La Tengo's FakeBook, cost $9.99 at Music Boulevard, $12.99 at Amazon – and $15.49 at CDNow. (Older, big-name CDs are likely to cost the same everywhere: Led Zeppelin IV sells for $12.99 at Music Boulevard and Amazon and $11.88 at CDNow.) Factor in shipping costs, too; at the moment, Music Boulevard holds a decisive advantage, thanks to a 99-cent flat-fee shipping special (by comparison, a three-disc order would cost $5 to ship from Amazon or CDNow). In any case, always swing by each site to check prices before you buy.

Shipping should usually take about a week, although you can pay extra for express delivery. Amazon.com, having pioneered the online-bookstore market several years ago, seems to have more of this figured out: It estimates shipping times in hours instead of days and delivered the goods a full week faster than the other two sites.

Just like megastores in the physical world, these three giant online shops may not be the best place for out-of-print or independent-label records. Fortunately, the Web has become a vital meeting place for niche record collectors too, with genre-specific stores, from Latin-jazz to Japanese-noise, popping up at a healthy clip throughout the Web. There are far too many to list here, but Global Electronic Music Marketplace provides a good entryway to the scene.

GEMM http://www.gemm.org doesn't actually sell anything itself; rather, it catalogues more than 3 million new and used records stocked by more than 1,600 discounters, importers and artists, whom in some cases you must contact individually for the actual purchase. I successfully used it to track down several releases absent from the bigger sites. The site has no review links or sound bites, so it works less well as a browsing tool, but if you're the type of music-lover who never enters a store without a shopping list in hand, GEMM's worth a visit for the potential bargains. You'll certainly save enough time to spend more of your hours on the important part of buying music: listening.

Toomey co-founded the Simple Machines record label in Arlington and plays in the band Tsunami.