Ben Hammersley reports in the Guardian on bands that have extended the tape-trading tradition online by encouring their fans to trade high-quality digital audio files online.
For many, MP3s are the musical equivalent of a hairy kiss from a maiden aunt: it's music, yes, but it lacks a bit. So many fans have turned to swapping music in another file format: music recorded from concerts, with the permission of bands.
The file format is called Shorten, and is a lossless compression format. So while the files are relatively small, they don't lose any musical fidelity. MP3s, on the other hand, use a "lossy" compression technique — they save on space by missing out some of the detail.
