music downloaders gets a leg up on record industry!

boy.. you take a few months off from downloading music and when you check it out again its a whole new ballgame.. now most downloading seems to no longer be individual mp3 files but rather a new site called rapidshare hosts entire albums for people in RAR format...people basically upload their albums to rapidshare and then post on the links on their own blogs.. then 100s of people click on link and instantly download file... if you don't have a rapidshare "premium" account you can only download 1 file per hour (I think longer albums have to be broken up into two files) otherwise you can download as many as you want..... no longer are people individually downloading mp3s.. and i notice a lot of the files seem to not be mp3 but some other format called m4a.. anyways... this type of filesharing is really a step up

of course we can be sure the record labels will go after rapidshare.. but it does seem that downloading files has never been easier despite the record industry's best efforts...

i'm a bit torn on this whole thing myself.. now if i'm downloading some obscure 1970s johnny cash live album recorded at a swedish prison which has never been available on cd..wellthats one thing.. or lets say the cure's unplugged session from 1991 (which i'm currently waiting on from rapidshare)- a great session by the way.. i remember seeing this live.. there's one song where the audience participates playing kazoos...or say big john patton's unreleased blue note album "blue john" (with grant green!) but on the other hand this will make it easier for people to download newly released albums and that raises ethical concerns me thinks.... still you got to say life keeps getting better for the music listener.... and think of a person who does not live in the US but rather in some country like argentina where most of these cds are not available and have never been available.. with rapidshare there's instant equal access for everyone..

as before www.tofuhaus.antville.org is a great clearing house on links and sites for downloading music..