Imagine the scene: eyes closed , Sennheiser headphones at full volume, song reaching its musical climax, trance-like state, pulse accelerating, delicious tingling sensation in spine, hairs on skin standing on end, goosebumps appearing and suddenly the music goes quiet.....

"Too Ta Ti!! "

Now I'm normally a very calm, peaceful individual who hasn't been involved in a direct physical confrontation since I was at school, but having an ecstatic experience interrupted in this way momentarily brings on a wave of violence that makes me wish a slow and painful death on whoever commited such an act of audio vandalism - perhaps involving the participation of renowned torturers from Middle Eastern , Asian or African totalitarian regimes.

Moral: Music sharers - if you have promotional mp3s please mark them very cleary or wipe 'em.

To record labels: ....er , no. I'm not going to rush out and spend my entire month's salary on a couple of full CDs just to hear the bits covered by telephone beeps and wizzywuzzy noises. But I might spend money on international calls to a few contacts...

Me seems to be a bit stupid and not understanding the moral/intention of your message...

Forgive me. My point, apart from venting frustration, is that irritating potential customers is not the most brilliant of sales techniques.

On the contrary, I'm only too in touch - I work in the music industry and spend a lot of time scanning filesharing networks for musical tendencies. Madonna and her ilk I don't need to download as they're played on TV and Radio 20 million times per day. My irritation comes from the fact that artists I previously had no problems with are now being affected by this phenomenon - so I completely agree with what you say about it getting worse.

Well countermeasures are taken with Bitzi and SHA1
Plus: I can't think of anyone who would keep his non-working files on his HD so the fake files can only be spread from the same static IPs, right?

You'd be surprised at how lazy people are about checking their files. I obviously block the typical T1/T3 servers that spout out looped / beepy versions which increases the quality of my searches. But when I browse ordinary users I often find they have a mix of perfectly good files and corrupt ones or demos. In these cases, there is clearly no malicious intent it's just that they don't check their files - or don't care - and there are too many of them to block, apart from the fact that they may also have good files that interest you. All of the cases that have recently offended my ears have been this type of user.

btw, here is a guy who tries to invent "painful, disorienting and mind state altering sounds. Many sound samples that have been generated based on people's votes and suggestions":

http://www.voltsamps.com/pages/projects/sndpain/