bandnet.org is designed to help musicians and fans utilise the power of peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing technology to distribute their music.
The idea originally came from a simple Perl script known as Alice's Restaurant ('You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant!'), created by a member of the Shareaza P2P community. The script allowed users to post MAGNET links to files on the Gnutella2 network. Several other sites also followed, including ShareLive, gamephilez.us and freebase.be. However, none of these focused specifically on music, and so another member of the Shareaza community, Higgy, set about creating such a site.
With the creation of several prototype sites the focus of the site has shifted slightly towards allowing artists to showcase themselves rather than simply links to their music. More focus is now put on helping users to find music they may not have heard and might enjoy.
Of course, the legality of downloading music has come under scrutiny in the years following the music download service Napster. However, according filesharing network monitoring company Big Champagne, the number of people logged on to filesharing networks globally has increased since 2003, reaching figures around the 10 million mark at the beginning of 2006. Therefore, given this increasing trend, it makes sense to try to join in rather than try to go against it. So that's what we do.
As long as you use a filesharing program to download from this site, you will be helping other people to get that music, too. But don't worry, all the music available on the site may be freely distributed and shared with friends. Much of it is released under Creative Commons licenses or into the public domain. This means you won't get into trouble for sharing content from this site.
Please remember, though, using filesharing networks to distribute content covered by copyright may be classed as copyright infringement and could get you into some legal trouble.