here's the concept: guy makes music..wants to make some sort of profit from it. He makes a CD or tape and tries to figure out how to get enough people to buy it to make the whole effort worthwhile. Now, he MAY put out free demos, he MAY go with a producer/distributor, he MAY stand on the corner and sing the songs and sell CDs from a bin....but it should be his choice. If he guesses wrong, he'll learn better.

If HE wants to put up samples on the WWW, fine...makes a certain amount of sense, depending on the music, and it's easy enough to do if that's what HE wants. But if YOU decide to distribute HIS stuff in ways he does not approve,(even if you're SURE he's wrong), that's illegal, immoral and mean.

All the rhetoric about "record companies' loss of control" is just noise if the artist has agreed with the record companies about who makes marketing decisions! The point is, there must be ONE set of rules...there are LOTS of choices within the set of rules. Simply deciding that you'll download stuff just because it's there, without checking to see if this artist put it there or approves, is just plain stealing, even if you kid yourself that no one but some corporate entity is 'really' being hurt.