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Who cares if it's illegal? It's an essential way for music to spread around, and generates publicity for underground acts that don't have a blanket distribution of their albums. What the hell does an organization like the RIAA know about good music? Nothing but figures and statistics. Which again will show that filesharing creates attention around the artists it tries to protect.
It all comes down to whether you're able to remain conscientious enough to still find a way to support the bands/artists you feel deserve it. If you have three or four albums by a band, maybe been to a concert, I see no problem with downloading out-of-print and hard to obtain stuff by them. I have kept (mostly) independent record labels with donut-money for years, and will continue to do so gladly, so what's the harm if I check out some of their new additions to the stable? Or get some ridiculously rare 7inch by a long-defunct band from a person on a file-sharing program?
Or what about albums that sell or have sold a lot of units? A lot of stuff that gets downloaded is by artists on bloated budgets, on big record labels. Which is, ironically, those who are most likely to be litigiously inclined.
But why would you want to download a Black-Eyed Peas-record anyway, right?
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