Why no ZShare?

On average, I receive about 20 emails a day from PRs, artists and bands all asking me to feature their work on BCG. I also receive about 10 emails a week from DJs asking me to push their latest mixtape. The commonality between all these: Their music is distributed on filesharing site ZShare.net .

Since last week, some funny business has been going on with ZShare, making the site unusable for most customers of BT or Virgin Media (2 of the UKs largest ISPs). If you are a band, PR or DJ and you're trying to send me stuff for consideration, please post to another filesharing host, such as Yousendit.com . Sharebee.com is a good service, as it will upload to four different hosting options for you (including ZShare), meaning that you music will be heard by those you're trying to reach.

Rumour has it that this is part of the new drive by the BPI and UK ISPs to stamp out piracy. Fair enough, we all know that filesharing sites like ZShare are used to distribute albums by hard up artists like Madonna and Coldplay. But by stopping access to ZShare, the BPI are hitting the industry where it hurts - at grassroots level, where Artists, Bands and DJs who can't afford to host their own music use the service because they're aren't backed by a 6 figure marketing campaign.

As one door closes, another opens. But for all the petabytes of demos, mixes and E-PR that are currently inaccessible to many key members on the bottom rung of the industry ladder, as well as to the fans who use these channels to help support the next Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys or [insert your own music phenomenon here], this is a cruel blow. Especially when there are thousands of search engines, forums and blogs out there that are using other tools to illegally distribute content on a mass scale.

Combatting piracy does not mean closing down services people rely on. How long until MP3 blogs (like this one) are closed down or ignored by ISPs? And who decided that ISPs could dictate which content we could view and use anyway?