"Since the advent of P2P people have been desperate for ways to share
their knowledge of all this new music with each other. The trouble was
that to be able to share playlists online you need to be able to link
directly to the music files and be sure that the other person would be
able to download them. While it remained illegal to transfer the
majority of recorded music online, it's only recently, now that record
labels (mostly netlabels, but also old-fashioned labels that provide
downloads as samplers), MP3 blogs and enthusiasts who collect rarities
and live recordings have started to post tracks online, that we've been
able to create playlists directly linked to hosted files."
