"May I suggest Topics 24 CD Voice Of The People set if you are after Feral singing... Not available as a download sadly

Really?

It's available as a download from eMusic. 20p a track if you have the subscription I have. All legit and above board:
Voice of the People

Lots of other Topic stuff there, including some they have reissued as downloads but not CDs. This is a good thing, in my opinion. It shows they are engaging with advances in music technology. It also means they get to put out their archive stuff without the financial costs/risks and environment implications of a CD reissue. Having said that, I wish these sites would use good quality VBR files not 192kbps CBR files.

On the other hand, I think the policy of sites like iTunes charging 79p a pop for an mp3 is diabolical and will do nothing to stop filesharing/music blogging (VOTP as mp3s at this price would end up costing more than the CD, despite being considerably cheaper to produce/distribute etc).

Downloads are an obvious answer to the Celtic Music problem and various other problems (such as the disppearance of more-or-less the entire Argo Folk catalogue into the bowels of Vivendi Multi-Mega-Corp's don't give a shit about this music storage facility), that are currently only being addressed - rightly or wrongly - by blog sites such as Time Has Told Me and so on. Yes, putting up Leader/Trailer/Rubber/insert-label-name-here stuff is stealing from Dave Bulmer (and not from the artists in these cases), but stealing something he doesn't seem very interested in. If he could be persuaded to put even part of his immense back catalogue on line, I reckon he could recoup the cost and even make a modest profit (which could even gasp be shared with the artists and/or their descendents). Certainly more constructive than a) railing at him or b) railing at those who are putting up copies of the out of print albums he owns the rights to. Plenty of this stuff will probaly never make it onto CD but could make it onto fairly priced legal downloads.

In the meantime, canny independent artists and labels could do worse than to let some of the better written/more knowledgeable blogs have the odd track for download - this would give them back some control, give them free advertising and allow them to access music fans who might not visit their usual haunts. Moaning about it and spending precious time roaming the internet looking for illegally posted stuff isn't going to help that much - as several posters have already said, Pandora's box is open. I also think its a nonsense to assume that the people who run these sites don't care about music. Why the heck otherwise would they be doing it? They're not making any money from it and putting in a lot of time. I seriously doubt they are killing music any more than home taping was.

Finally, don't assume that just because something has been reissued on CD and you can hand over money for it that its legit. There are plenty of grey/unauthorised CD resissues of stuff from the 60s and 70s, much but not all of it coming from the Far East. In these cases the labels and retailers are making money from the CDs (as are the sites such as Amazon that carry them), but the owners of the recordings or the artists aren't seeing a penny. In many ways these labels are far worse than the music blogs, because money is changing hands.

Point of clarification: Dick Miles, Anonyma and Jim Causley's albums have long since been taken down from THTM. They've kept the written stuff up because they clearly like the music and want to tell people about it. I agree that new/available stuff shouldn't be uploaded without the artists' permission (a friend's album was up there before he'd finished paying for the recording of it - they took it straight down when asked)... but what I also think is that this "someone must do something about it" huffery-puffery and these spurious comparisons with stealing food from your plumber's starving children's mouths and similar emotional reasoning will change nothing. Far better to try to engage with what's out there and use it to your advantage.

Shoot me down. I'm clearly a bad person.