Last year, the classical-music charts were dominated by two distribution companies: the world’s largest record label and a five-year-old, Stockholm-based digital company with 43 employees, no performers under contract and virtually no profile in the broader music business.

The contrast between the giant Universal Music Group and the tiny X5 Music Group AB offers insight into the future of music distribution.

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This is the iTunes-meets-classical project I told you about in July. Sony owns the shop, but sells music from most of the big labels.

Who needs an all-classical iTunes? Both labels and music fans, apparently: Conventional online stores don’t feature much classical music, for obvious reasons. And while the crummy sound quality of most online music doesn’t seem to bother most people, it’s a real problem for classical connoisseurs.

So Sony gives classical a room of its own, and promises that it will sound good, too, because its downloads come in two different formats.

There’s a 320-kilobits-per-second version that Sony promises will produce “near–CD quality audio” (the more kilobits, the better the sound; Apple upgraded its catalog to 256 kbps in 2009).

And there’s also a “lossless” version (FLAC, for those who care about this stuff) that’s supposed to be even denser and better. In my brief self-guided tour through the store on Monday, I found that the lossless stuff generally sold at a premium of about $2 per album.

Hate digital music players, period? That’s okay. Sony will sell you CDs, too. In fact, that’s the only way you’ll get music from Universal Music, the world’s biggest label–for whatever reason, it has licensed only discs, not downloads, to Ariama. (You can get Universal’s stuff in download form from rival classical store Passionato.com.)

Tough for me to assess the quality and selection here, given that I know next to nothing about classical. But last time I wrote about this, you guys contributed plenty of insightful commentary on the topic. So take a look, and tell us what you think.

Sony Music thinks it has an answer: It plans to open its own online store dedicated to classical music, and perhaps jazz as well. Sources tell me that Sony (SNE) is prepping a specialty store that features high fidelity, “lossless” downloads, and is on track to bring in the other big labels–Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group (WMG) and EMI–for a launch this fall. No comment from Sony.

I don’t believe Sony has formally signed on the other labels yet, but the industry sources I’ve talked to seem confident that all of the majors will be on board, via non-exclusive deals, sooner than later.

That makes sense: This one doesn’t require any label to rethink a business model, and the stakes are fairly low. The labels don’t sell much classical or jazz online, so if they can get any kind of boost here, it’s all gravy.

Do a genre-specific store and higher-quality audio matter? For most digital music, the answer has been a resounding “no”: People seem quite content to listen to severely compressed files on lousy speakers and headphones.

And people–perhaps those very same people!–manage to easily find the newest Kesha single at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.

But I’m out of my depth here: My classical collection consists of a couple random Mozarts, some Beethoven and maybe a Handel. I’m not sure, because I never play them. For those of you who do: Is Sony’s upcoming project appealing? Let me know in the comments below.

Anyway, now it’s not. The cash-strapped publisher has sold WQXR-FM for $45 million, carving up the asset into two packages for different buyers–local NPR affiliate WNYC and Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Radio, a unit of Univision Communications.

The money will be used to chip away at the paper’s $1 billion debt (the terms of the $250 million loan it took out from billionaire Carlos Slim pretty much require that the paper do that whenever it sells off anything significant). It’s not much, but it may end being more than the paper gets for the Boston Globe, which it bought for $1.1 billion in 1993.

The Times has owned the station since 1944; it sold off its AM sibling to Disney (DIS) in 2006.

The deal involves a swap of licenses and equipment between multiple stations, but that won’t be of interest to you unless you listen to classical music or Spanish-language programming on New York City radio stations. If you do, the details are in the release.

This week, I dived into the music blogging world of MOG.com, a Web site where enthusiasts can read, blog and network with one another. Starting today, this site will integrate with Rhapsody, the subscription-based music service, so that MOG users, or MOGGERS, can simultaneously blog about and listen to millions of songs that fuel their online discussions.

Rhapsody is now integrated into MOG’s site for music aficionados.

MOG Inc. prides itself on working as a destination for people who hope to discuss music tastes and opinions, like TripAdvisor.com works for travelers. MOG’s first public beta, or test version, came out about a year and a half ago.

Its use of a subscription model comes at a time when CD profits are lagging and larger social-networking sites are negotiating with record labels to incorporate music streaming. Plenty of people still prefer purchasing music a la Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store, where there aren’t restrictions due to streaming or subscriptions.

Along with built-in Rhapsody, this newly enhanced version of MOG includes other improvements, such as a better search engine and a speedy tool that generates personal profiles for each MOG user according to his or her musical tastes.

I was granted early access to MOG’s revamped site and was most impressed by its fast search tool, which works just like the Spotlight search in Apple’s operating system. Results are narrowed with each typed letter and returned in neatly divided categories. Best of all, music results came back as fast as if they were on my hard drive instead of various MOG pages and Rhapsody’s database.

MOG also does a good job of marrying its contents with Rhapsody in a way that isn’t overly obvious; tiny Play icons beside song titles can be selected to start hearing a tune through the Rhapsody player, which hums along in the background, and similar icons add songs to playlists in one step.

But for a site that prides itself on appealing to music enthusiasts, I found certain genres much more represented than others. The rock music category, for example, had plenty of related posts and coinciding Rhapsody music, but the classical music section was almost nonexistent and country tunes were poorly represented. I typed “Bach” into the search box, expecting to be flooded with results, but saw no music and only one post by a MOG user about why she thought Bach was a great composer. The company says it will fix this in the next couple of months.

Unlimited Rhapsody access costs $13 monthly and is offered free for the first 14 days. But, like all subscription models, it blocks access to music if you don’t pay this monthly fee. MOGGERS who don’t want to pay or don’t plan on using Rhapsody as much can choose from two free options: one that allows users to listen to 25 songs a month and another that only allows free 30-second clips of song.

MOGGERS can upload their own MP3s within blog posts on the site. But linking to Rhapsody songs was easier and faster.

I got started by clicking a giant “Magic Button” icon on the MOG site. This installed MOG-O-MATIC, a tool that automatically searched my computer’s hard drive for all of my music files, then indexed them and created a profile of my music taste on a personalized My MOG page. This tool was also available in the first version of MOG but is 10 times as fast now, indexing 10,000 songs an hour compared with 1,000 songs previously.

I liked that MOG-O-MATIC did some page-creation work for me, making a list of the songs I listened to most recently — regardless of what program I used to listen to the song (iTunes, Windows Media Player or Rhapsody). Another list that was automatically generated from my music showed which artist was best represented in my collection. If you don’t want the world to know about your Barry Manilow obsession, this list can be altered to fudge the truth.

Because MOG-O-MATIC scans your entire music collection, it knows what music you like. A Recommendations page shows you what other MOGGERS with similar tastes are listening to, helping you discover new tunes. I found these suggestions to be pretty accurate, and even discovered a great song on another MOGGER’s recommended playlist called “Summer Teeth” by Wilco. I checked out the page belonging to the MOGGER who created this playlist, and found other tunes that were in line with my musical taste.

Using Rhapsody, I played entire Web pages of recommended songs with one click. Likewise, entire music collections belonging to other people can be played the same way, as long as you have the right Rhapsody account to play that many songs.

I wrote a blog post on MOG about the newest album from “Fountains of Wayne,” and it automatically included a Play button icon, enabling the song I wrote about to play along with my post. This auto-linking is done with fill-in-the-blank boxes that tag each post with music.

MOG isn’t trying to be a social-networking site that enables all things. Instead, it focuses on one thing, music, and successfully improves the way people discuss, share and discover music online.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.