It looks like the music industry has won another battle : ISPA members (which contain all Belgian internet providers) have closed all mp3 newsgroups on their newsservers. One might consider this move quite strange, as some of the mp3 newsgroups were used to post own mp3 samples, like people posting music they made themselves. On the other hand, won't this encourage people to spoil other (non-binary) groups with mp3 stuff ? Anyway, a sad decision; I have downloaded music in the past too via newsgroups, and even bought some CD's from the music I downloaded, so it wouldn't surprise me if this decision might even further lessen the CD sales.


But it seems that the music industry is even winning the war : the majority of downloaded music is coming from 'legal' sources like iTunes and stuff : thousands of people downloading crapp-ass-quality mp3's or wma's (128 kbit encoding really sucks) for a price that is as expensive as a normal CD.
How ironical.