In honor of my recent purchase of High Fidelity...
Top 5 audio clips I now really enjoy that I never would of heard of without peer to peer services....

5. I'm the Only Gay Eskimo by the Bad News Bears
4. Preacher's Daughter by the Refreshments
3. Anything from Mitch Hedberg
2. The Long Day is Over by Norah Jones
1. Atlanta by Lewis Black

Mitch Hedberg is hysterical. i too would never have heard of him without file sharing

I've never quite gotten the hang of just searching for random stuff. I just search for stuff that's been suggested to me or that I find a review of or something. That is, stuff I'm considering buying and want to take a gander at first. How do you guys manage to find just random stuff?

Comedy I usually find by just putting in "stand up" or "comedy". Music I usually search by artist if I know one song, but don't want to buy the whole album without listening to it first. In the past I searched for bands I knew I liked and then chose, "more by same user" assuming I might like something else they had.

Mitch was recommended to me by a friend. i rarely search for random stuff myself

I myself can't laud the P2P apps for expanding my horizons, but I can definitely say that the "old school" days of being on EFNet's #mpeg3 IRC channel got me into a lot of new music. Not just by talking about music with others and asking what's good, but also when I'd go onto someone's FTP site. I'd be looking for certain things, but a lot of times I'd throw in some other songs to my batch download that I didn't really know about, but happened to be available. With the P2P apps, you're usually searching, whereas the FTP sites allowed for more of a "browsing" type approach.

As Mr. West points out, you can do the same sort of thing with most P2P networks. Of course, I always forget about that or don't have the time. Makes sense, though.

I still use newsgroups. Scrolling through 10,000+ tunes you're bound to see something you wouldn't have thought of in a million years. Quality varies, but for the most part is ok. It takes a while so I might do it quarterly.

That's my $0.03.

-Zeke