Complete albums and no annoying slow connections, no disconnections in the middle...
let's see, today in 20 minutes of paging through the boards I got a 2 CD Current 93 live album, Robert Henke - Floating Point, Joe Meek And The Blue Men - I Hear A New World, Beatles - White Album, Black Texicans cowboy music from the 30s, Explorer Series - African Drums'n'Drones, Serge Gainsbourg - L'homme a tete de chou
Your tastes may differ, but there are like 100 different mp3 newsgroups to sample :) !
Try finding THOSE in record stores! And that's just the point. Walk into an average record store these days and you are confronted with overpriced mediocrity. Madonna, Backstreet Boys and Puff Daddy for $16 a pop. Then you have the endless sea of old catalog product that the record companies are still foisting upon us for the "budget" price of $12 and up. I'm talking old Elton John, Journey and Styx albums here. I've always wanted to own the Beatles catalog on CD but it is still prohibitively expensive. $15 a CD for albums that were released over 30 years ago and that I paid for twice already on vinyl and cassette! Give me a break. So I'm burning my old cassettes into CD. A large project but I'm saving thousands of dollars. Of course, if Beatles CD's were priced at $5 or less, I'd own them today.
But I digress. The sad fact is that about 90% of the good music out there cannot be found in your average record store. That's why MP3 sharing sites like WinMX are so wildly popular. You can find practically anything ever recorded out there. It's an awesome distribution system. Pity the recording industry never took advantage of this technology early on. They could have wrestled some control over it and had they charged a nominal fee (or subscription fee), the revenues would be flowing into their coffers by now. Most people would have gladly paid some $20 a month to download music from a Napster-style environment. But the recording industry have missed the boat.