There are tons of others reasons not to get your music from P2P filesharing services, but for me, the main reason is because they’re so horribly encoded. I did a little looking with Encspot on some of the music I’ve been sampling, and about 2% of the files were decently encoded (either LAME, FhG, Blade or new Xing encoded @ 192Kbps+ or VBR). Also, a very small percentage were properly tagged. I didn’t bother to count as Encspot doesn’t give a statistical breakdown. This was a pretty large sample that I’m working from. A frightening number of the files were old Xing encoded.
This is not in any way to blow off P2P filesharing. If anything it’s an argument for it. I use Morpheus to find out if something I’ve heard of is worth listening to. I haven’t figured out really how the music industry has lasted this long showing the stupidity they do. Here is something that saves them kajillions in both marketing and distribution. Both essentially become free. Sell all kinds of stuff people would never have found anyway for little cost. Users share and trade files, but just have a link so that one can buy the album directly (CDs are fine). MP3.com was on the right track with their personal music storage idea. A service where I could organize and stream (in multiple bandwidths) songs that I owned to where-ever I wanted would be truly useful. Why bother with this pay-per-play business when you can just as easily be constantly selling people new songs? Of course, that would actually be something that would benefit artists, music lovers, consumers in addition to the industry, so it’s obviously out of the question.
Long-time readers will note that I’ve spouted off about this same topic for years now. Scary isn’t it? It’s not like it’s non-obvious or anything.