Limewire is decent

limewire had a few security holes n stuff, personally i find soulseek the best, you can get full albums, and a lot of rarities.

The problem with peer to peer is that is sucks bandwidth both ways, tends to be a security risk, slow, legally risky and more hassle than its worth really. Music blogs are the way forward I reckon, as they can genuinely use the defense that the sole purpose of using them is to discover new music rather than just get the latest Coldplay album for free. http://music.for-robots.com/ and http://boomselection.info/ are two of the better ones. http://www.culturedeluxe.com/ is fun too if you like mashups, though has a lot of dross to wade through as unlike the other two I mentioned everything submitted gets posted and then compiled into a big chart. http://bubblegum-machine.com/ if your life is lacking cheese.

http://regnyouth.blogspot.com/ is another music blog which is very, very good. Check out the archives. A good trick with google if you are searching for a particular band, say Radiohead, search for "Radiohead site:regnyouth.blogspot.com"

peer to peer sucks. music blogs are the best paces to download. i use regnyouth quite a bit, although the files are been taken down more often now. other good blogs are youaintnopicasso and musicterrormonkey the latter is good, because they take requests and generally come up with the goods pretty darn quickly

Limewire is good for other things like ebooks and videos but soulseek is much better for music - takes a bit longer as it doesn't use multiuser downloading but all the music files actually work (unlike limewire) and it does have lots of rarities and new stuff. I find music blogs slow and akward - that said it is ages since I tried any.

There's a fella on Salon.com who digs up interesting free downloads on a daily basis. All his previous finds are archived on his page as well: http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/ (you may have to sit through an advert to read the full page) eoghan

i'm with those who're pointing u towards the blogs. P2P can be a right pain in the ass. one of the best blogs i've come across is http://blog.largeheartedboy.com - theres a list of really good stuff every day. He's a big Wilco fan so he knows his way to Wilco rarities/live stuff but he's also excellent when it comes to US indie (Arcade Fire months and months ago etc)

Another site I've come across is http://www.tonspion.de/, which is a legit site thats basically a hub for finding free and legal MP3s (well I think they're legal). Its in German, but the language isn't too much of a barrier to using the site. I know this "where to download MP3s" subject comes up pretty often, but its great that someone raises it every now and then, some great links posted that I hadn't come across before. The problem is finding the time to listen to all this stuff!

Jesus. I wasn't really aware that there were blogs that had such a vast amount of stuff (had dabbled with Limewire but that's about it). To echo Binokular, the problem is indeed finding the time...