Usenet Audio

Carel writes "Everybody who has done some streaming knows the downside: as soon as you're getting popular the costs are getting sky-high. While there have been some efforts in the P2P area these didn't have the impact they need. Enter Usenet Audio, a project that uses the existing, distributed and proven Usenet as its medium. Check the site for details and for the beta-versions of the software (which is available for Linux, OS X and MS platforms)."

Interesting..

[iswm]

But I think a neat idea for streaming audio would be a BitTorrent type protocol, where if you listen to the stream a client will help distrubute it to other listeners using your bandwidth. There could be some issues with it I suppose, but I think it could be a reasonable idea.

This looks like a joke, but

[Hythlodaeus]

This looks like a joke, but I did this back in the day. I checked out a number of bands by getting .au files UU encoded in usenet over my 14.4 connection to AOL. It took about 12 hours to get a song. And yes, I did buy the album later.