The great thing about smaller bands is that you can often find bands that come from your local area and then go and see them play live. Being able to see a favourite band live more than once a year (or lifetime) without expending huge amounts of money and time is pretty cool. Many music search engines will let you search for bands of a particular genre in a particular area, which makes it all quite easy.

A fairly major contributor to online music scene is remixer. These people take other tunes and redo them, often in a techno style because one person can do this competently. Chief among tunes selected to be remixed are those old ditties that used to play through simplest of sound chips on now aging consoles: video game theme songs. People now go and grab main tune line from an old favourite and fill it out, making real work our imaginations used to do for us to turn single tone melodies into orchestral masterpieces. A few good places to start are http://remix.kwed.org and http://remix.overclocked.org as well as a personal favourite band http://machinaesupremacy.com

I hope this has given you something to think about. It's not hard to come across illegal MP3 rips, in fact it's often hard to avoid them, but if you give free music scene a look you may find something completely different and new that will really do it for you. With web hosts already being penalized hugely for illegal content being stored on their servers (having an entire server taken down because of one inconsiderate user is damaging and irritating beyond belief) and moves being made to charge ISPs for content being accessed by their users, it makes more sense than ever to get out there and grab yourself an awesomely original and completely legal music collection.

There are a number of ad-blocking software alternatives available in market today, both free and paid for. Among free software that was tested and has proved to be fairly effective are 12Ghosts Popup-Killer and 12Ghosts StopMessengerAds. Also, shareware such as STOPzilla!, ABF Internet Explorer Tools, AdBeGone PopUp Killer and CoffeeCup PopUp Blocker have received some good critiques. Free pop-up blockers, such as STOPzilla and Panicware, are readily available for download. Both Google and Yahoo toolbars include ability to block pop-ups. That capacity is also enabled by default in Microsoft's XP Service Pack Two (SP2) settings for Internet Explorer. Most ad-blocking programs work as specialized proxy servers. Once running on your PC, they examine addresses that your browser requests, check each one against entries in a frequently updated database of ad server addresses, and then drop requests for ad content. Some also rely on pattern matching to look for windows and images that match known sizes and shapes of ads. Leaving inconvenience aside, there are other good reasons to fight back. For example, blocking ads frees up precious bandwidth and can protect your privacy. Ads take time to load, and they invariably get in way of what you are really interested in while surfing on Internet. Because many ad servers place cookies on your computer, ad companies are able to track your surfing. These companies claim that function of most cookies they set is to regulate type and amount of advertisements you receive. But because larger ad services span a wide array of web sites, ad-related cookies can also provide ad companies a lot of insight into your web surfing preferences. And this is a critical issue since you, as most of us consumers, have never explicitly consented to be followed on web. If you want to learn more about your privacy rights, visit www.Anti-Spam-League.org website. This organization has a lot of valuable information on privacy, spam, identity theft and other common Internet abuses. Become a free member by visiting www.Anti-Spam-League.org. Finally, there is debate regarding whether using ad-supported web sites is giving implicit obligation to tolerate and support online ads. Logically, advertisers think that implicit contract seems to be acceptable to most users and web sites because without advertisements, Internet as we know it would vanish really fast. However, consumers think differently. In end, people have a right to control what appears on their computer.

Advertisers use these intrusive techniques simply because they are effective. Sad but true. Some of most intrusive ads have unfortunate effect of quickly catching customers’ attention and as a result, pop-up blocking software is getting more and more popular these days. Even Microsoft announced in end of 2003 that new Internet Explorer will include popup ad blocker. Naturally, it is foreseeable that popup advertisers are likely to start developing software to bypass it. In April of 2004 Falk eSolutions AG, a global provider of ad delivery and management solutions, launched a new ad targeting option to automatically detect pop-up blocker software on users’ computers and instantly convert pop-up and pop-under inventory to alternate formats for optimal delivery to those users. Our belief is that as new popup-blocking software comes out, more aggressive pop-up display methods are likely to emerge to bypass defense. As a final thought, no anti-ad utility works flawlessly; but without ads, you would not be annoyed so frequently with undesired commercial messages, and pages would definitely load faster!

If you want to learn more about this and other related topics, check out www.Anti-Spam-League.org. This organization offers free membership and chance to access a wide amount of relevant information on privacy, spam, email abuse, Internet fraud, responsible marketing and several other topics.