Been getting a bit hooked on this site called Amie Street. I'm downloading lots, but also trying it out from the artist side. Artists / labels upload MP3s which are initially available for free. As people download them, the price (quickly?) increases, up to a max of US 98c a file. When you sign up you get "RECs", i.e. a number of recommendations you can make for tracks, and if the price of a track you recommend goes up you get some credit in your account. So it's basically rewarding "early adopters". You can't recommend without buying the track you want to recommend first, which stops uploaders from just recommending everything they upload (well, unless they want to download it first, but inflating your own prices by doing that probably makes your MP3s less attractive?).

Anyway, there's a bit of cheap Kiwi stuff up there.

• The Black Seeds
• Brother J
• Filmic
• Liam Finn
• Montano - spam alert ;)
• One Million Dollars
• The Phoenix Foundation
• Pitch Black

I reckon the good points are:

• It's open to anyone. Lou Reed, Sam & Dave, Kid Koala, Modest Mouse, Billie Holiday, J Dilla, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Art Brut, The National, Legendary Pink Dots, Madlib, The Game, Buckethead (!), Skinny Puppy, Meat Puppets, etc. through to stuff where people have honestly stated its the first thing they ever recorded in their bedroom.
• The pricing model is cool for buyers. Pretty cheap, stock market vibe encourages decisive purchasing, sniffing out bargains, etc. ;)
• The pricing model is cool for artists, you pay nothing to put stuff up, they just take a share of any revenue you might make.
• Customer service has been speedy and nice so far.
• Fair use of the files. No DRM, uploaders can put as high quality MP3s as they like, users can download each file up to 15 times. I had trouble with one and a customer service person reset the count for me with no questions asked.

The bad points:

• It's open to anyone. There's so much crap up there, the navigation would have to be awesome to encourage non-freaks to sift through any of it.
• The navigation isn't that awesome. You can browse genres, but they're shambles. Uploaders pick up to two genres for each album / EP / whatever and releases definitely seem to get overlooked just because an uploader has, say, put their dance tracks into "disco" instead of "house" or "dance" or "techno" or "electronic" without knowing which name the kids are calling the same old music this week... There's tagging, but it's only used in searches, so you can't browse around like with, say, flickr's explore function.
• Trusting users to upload stuff is often a bit messy - I've bought two tracks so far that were not what they stated, sometimes track titles are a shambles, sometimes almost all of an album available elsewhere on CD or through other MP3s shops has been uploaded. Presumably that's the uploader's choice, but it makes bad business sense.
• Handles compilations terribly. The example I've linked to is actually a compilation and only track 4 is by the artist LB. The uploader must've uploaded it that way, but the site has no real facility for handling comps properly. You have to specify an album artist first, which this uploader seems to have found a workaround for elsewhere, but even then the customers can't see the individual artists for any of the tracks. I think this is worst wrt searching - there may be compilation-exclusive morsels lurking in the corners of Amie St. but I'll never find them because even if I search the particular track artist name it won't return results.
• Generally there's just not the right amount of information to make informed choices, e.g. you don't know what quality files you'll get 'til they've reached your computer, long track titles are truncated on the site, there's no album-specific information, artist-specific information is usually pretty skant and useless.

I've scored so much stuff for free that I always ummed and ahhed about buying, and, being one of those old-fashioned types who doesn't like to trash friends' flats at parties, return a borrowed car with an empty tank, etc. it's nice knowing I got it for free with the artist's (or at least, label's) wishes. (I should be totally honest, lest I look like I'm getting on my high horses - I do download a huge amount of stuff illegally, but if I like it, I buy it, even if it's buying copies of exactly the same MP3s a friend has slipped me...)

"tl; dr", they say... :p