A few years ago, just as the classical record industry was screaming toward a market crash — foreshadowing the general decline in pop CDs — the BBC's classical radio Web site blew open the whole game.

The BBC made an extraordinary offer: free recordings of Beethoven's music. In a week, its smorgasbord "Beethoven Experience" drew a shocking 1.3 million downloads and, in the process, challenged status quo notions on classical's popularity. It bolstered the argument that more people, especially the young, would take in classical music if a) it wasn't found inside an uptight concert hall and b) it didn't cost much.

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The choicest picks on magnatunes.com come from Nicholas McGegan, a regular and much-prized Atlanta Symphony Orchestra guest conductor.
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Yet three years after the BBC's grand experiment, free classical music on the Web is still catch as catch can. While pop music has spiralfrog.com, where songs from the Universal label's massive catalog cost nothing and the site makes money from ads, there's nothing similar for classical music, where freebies are typically meant as a lure to hook a paying subscriber.

But there are great finds to be found, if you know where to listen. Here's a starter list.

An online-only record label, magnatunes.com has a happy slogan: "We are not evil." You can listen to everything for free or download an album on a pay-what-you-like basis, from $5 on up, which the company says it splits 50-50 with the musicians.

The classical catalog isn't huge but it's mostly high quality. The choicest picks come from Nicholas McGegan, a regular and much-prized Atlanta Symphony Orchestra guest conductor. Here the early-music specialist leads his Bay Area-based Philharmonia Baroque in a spirited, earthy reading of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. Trouble with magnatune's free service: Each movement comes with an annoying little coda — a breathy woman's voice announces the track name.

It's not painful after the long movements of the "Eroica," but the announcer completely compromises the free pleasures of McGegan's best offering: Handel's opera "Atalanta," in the only available recording. (After a few minutes, I decided the singing was good enough to spend the money and rip the complete opera onto my own blank CDs — where free samples led to a purchase.)

The idiosyncratic announcers on wabe.org (or 90.1 FM) remain the best deal for classical music through the work day and after dark, even as the station begs twice a year for membership pledges.

Start fishing elsewhere online, however, and the international menu seems vast, with the most compelling programs streamed off European state-funded public radio sites.

Take London's BBC Proms — www.bbc.co.uk/proms — 76 concerts running July 18-Sept. 13 and billing itself, without much hyperbole, as "the world's greatest music festival." The formula works: Major artists play masterpieces, unusual classics and world premieres. Among them is ASO conductor Donald Runnicles, who leads a Scottish orchestra in Beethoven and Mahler on Aug. 3.

Kenneth Montgomery, who brilliantly led Atlanta Opera's recent production of "Marriage of Figaro," conducts an eclectic program Aug. 7. (Concerts are in the evening, U.K. time, which is afternoon in Atlanta; some broadcasts remain on the site for up to a week after the event.)

A roundup site by and for local classical creators,

atlantacomposers.blogspot.com links to more than 40 composers' home pages. Since most composers nowadays rely on computer programs to notate what they hear in their heads, it's natural to post their latest sounds online.

Living composers and new-music venues are heavily wired to the Web, but the venerable Carnegie Hall is not falling behind. After New York's most hallowed stage offered the world premiere of David Lang's "The Little Match Girl Passion" last fall, the poignant, post-minimalist cantata streamed off carnegiehall.org.

The score won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for composition. You can hear it free, along with a dozen other Carnegie-commissioned works — a snapshot of contemporary classical music.

The ASO's site, atlantasymphony.org, offers excerpts of music and a tepid promotion for its upcoming concerts. (The ASO promises a revamp of the site in September.) Other orchestras use technology to a better advantage. From Los Angeles' laphil.org to New York's nyphil.org, these major ensembles stream live radio broadcasts, available complete with a couple of clicks.

The latest attempt to sell classical music by first offering samples comes from medici.tv. The free programs change often; as of this writing there's an early Mozart opera staged at France's top-tier Aix-en-Provence Festival, and a growing catalog of modestly-priced concert footage — Berlin Philharmonic, the Aspen Music Festival — from around the world.

This addictive nuisance and joy of YouTube.com is unmatched when it comes to free entertainment.

The site's staggering popularity — almost 100 million items and 3 billion views a month — will likely doom all future business models for selling pre-recorded entertainment in all fields.

Its legality is often in question, of course, since apparently folks upload copyrighted materials and their own stupid-pet videos with equal zeal and innocence. Watch what you can while you can; it might be gone tomorrow.

The riches are boundless. Try typing "Pavarotti and Kleiber" into the search box and drop into a live performance of Puccini from Milan, 1979.

Then follow the sequence: Bohème 01, 02, 03. I don't know how someone from Brazil got this footage from Italy's greatest opera house, but it's the most golden-voiced, electrifying highlights of "La Bohème" I've ever experienced, at any price.