Just tried Spotify

It has been out for a while but I didn't get to register an account until now since there's quite waiting time unless you get an invite.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I have to say that so far I'm very impressed. Almost all mainstream music can be found and quite a few more obscure artists too. It's like having a huge library of music on your computer, but all you need to store locally is the program itself and the cache, the music is streamed over the net. In a way it's like iTunes..search for an album, song or artist and play the tracks.. but instead of downloading the songs, you stream them over the net.. and it's 100% free (just the occasional short ad for free members). It's not like web radio, because you can choose which songs to play yourself.

How come the RIAA and other groups that freak out whenever someone mentions "file sharing" or "p2p" don't have anything against this program? You're not storing the songs permanently, but this program also allows everyone to listen to music without paying for a CD... supposedly they lose a lot of money when people do that because they don't get to sell as many CDs? :roll:

If more services like this one begin to appear, it soon won't make sense to download music and risk getting sued by the RIAA and others. The only reason you might want to download songs is if you want to listen to them on a MP3 player. With the prevalence of mobile broadband and wifi, maybe that won't even be an issue in the future...