I've been pursuing various links in my continuing quest to find easy ways to pay for music I like. I came across RCRD LBL.com which appears to be a curated online community for artists, labels, and fans to share and talk about music. They're obviously aiming at the hipper, more online-centric crowd; for example, you can follow them on Twitter and their "Genres" page is a tag cloud that I'd bet is derived by aggregating tags artists put on the uploaded content.

Currently, all their online content - including the legal downloads - is ad-supported. Much of it is distributed under Creative Commons licenses that allow people to reuse and remix the tracks for non-commercial purposes. They seem to be operating on a sponsorship model, rather than an impulse purchse model, so it's not precisely what I was looking for but it's clearly a very close neighbor.

Obvously ad-based/sponsored sites do better by getting more traffic so in a way I am 'paying' for music I found there by promoting them and I hope getting my dear readers to go to the site and continue spreading the word.