When file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January of this year, it left a gaping hole in our lives–wherefore art we now to send each other mp3s of the theme songs to Fraggle Rock and Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper for mix-making purposes? We must find a way to blaze on, and discover new, better file-sharing services with which we can upload music for friends and download theirs in turn, again turning the internet into our own private record-swap club. Here are five of the next-best-things we’ve found to get us by in the wake of Megaupload–and if you have an mp3 of Kevin G’s rap from the movie Mean Girls that you can send us, be sure to hit us up.
SendspaceClean, efficient, and easy to use, the recently remodeled Sendspace is certainly one of the best services to use for uploading and downloading individual songs–it only takes a few seconds to upload or download an average-sized mp3 to or from their server, and costs nothing. You can pay a monthly fee to avoid ads, get parallel downloads and download at a faster speed, but in our opinion it’s not necessary–long as you stay under 300MB per upload, there’s really not much to complain about here with the free service.
One of the O.G.’s of the file-sharing game, YouSendIt launched nearly a decade ago (2003) but still gets it done in 2012, although now it’s more designed for company-wide use (for pay, natch) a la Dropbox than it is for the individual consumer looking to send a friend mp3 evidence of why Marvin Gaye’s late-’70s disco run was underappreciated. Still, it can be used as a trial in a pinch, and the paper airplane logo is a nice touch.
These days, if you hear of a music leak ahead of its scheduled release date (especially in hip-hop), chances are that the mp3 can be found courtesy of Hulkshare, an upload service that makes embedding of its mp3 downloads for use on blogs or listening directly from the site particularly convenient. Hulkshare also has the added benefit of offering “My Music” and “My Files” libraries, allowing you to keep your uploaded files all nice and organized, and to even make playlists and the like out of them.
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Andrew Unterberger is a staff writer for Popdust, an online site voraciously covering the world of pop music. Unterberger lives in Astoria, New York, prefers Coke to Pepsi and casts a voodoo curse on LeBron James every NBA post-season. Popdust is the world’s foremost authority on pop music. Founded in February 2011, Popdust super-serves fans with a vibrant, irreverent, 24/7 mix of news, opinion, interviews, reviews, music premieres, and original video and content features on today’s biggest and brightest pop, hip-hop, R&B and country stars. Pop music has never been more commercially dominant or more creatively fertile–think Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and on and on–and yet its artists have never been afforded the kind of expert, passionate online coverage so often lavished on lesser, and lesser-selling, rock artists. Part music-nerd watering hole, part tart gossip outlet, Popdust is laser-focused on the never-ever-boring creative and personal lives of this generation’s most compelling entertainers.
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