Anyone out there worried about using P2P software to download music and other stuff from other peoples computers should try out the newsgroups. Anyone with an ISP account has access to that ISP's news server, although they tend to have poor retention of files - NTL tends to only have a couple of days worth of posts on the mp3 groups and a lot of posts are incomplete. Get yourself an account with a dedicated server - the one I use is www.newsfeeds.com - you can get a mid-priced account for $20 a month (it's in the US) this will give you up to 1.2Gb download per day from the mp3 servers alone, and access to around 15 different servers for other types of files from text only groups to images, multimedia, family, and adult ones - and you have a similar download limit on all of them! All for around £12 a month.

Downside - you're stuck with what others have posted to the groups, but you can request (nicely), and posting yourself will mean you are more likely to get a positive response. Other than that it's a brilliant and fast way of getting hold of good music. Only other thing you need is a good newsreader program - free-agent is good, but the registered version is brilliant - I've used it for 8 years now and get every upgrade as it comes out.

Anyone needs any more info on these let me know and I'll help in any way I can. :)