Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 03/08/2012 at 1:18 PM News

The Popdust Files: file sharing, my life scoop, sponsored, technology

When file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January of this year, it left a gaping hole in our lives—wherefore art we now to send each other mp3s of the theme songs to Fraggle Rock and Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper for mix-making purposes? We must find a way to blaze on, and discover new, better file-sharing services with which we can upload music for friends and download theirs in turn, again turning the internet into our own private record-swap club. Here are five of the next-best-things we’ve found to get us by in the wake of Megaupload—and if you have an mp3 of Kevin G’s rap from the movie Mean Girls that you can send us, be sure to hit us up.

Sendspace. Clean, efficient, and easy to use, the recently remodeled Sendspace is certainly one of the best services to use for uploading and downloading individual songs—it only takes a few seconds to upload or download an average-sized mp3 to or from their server, and costs nothing. You can pay a monthly fee to avoid ads, get parallel downloads and download at a faster speed, but in our opinion it’s not necessary—long as you stay under 300MB per upload, there’s really not much to complain about here with the free service.

YouSendIt. One of the O.G.’s of the file-sharing game, YouSendIt launched nearly a decade ago (2003) but still gets it done in 2012, although now it’s more designed for company-wide use (for pay, natch) a la Dropbox than it is for the individual consumer looking to send a friend mp3 evidence of why Marvin Gaye’s late-’70s disco run was underappreciated. Still, it can be used as a trial in a pinch, and the paper airplane logo is a nice touch.

For the rest of our Megaupload alternatives, head over to My Life Scoop for the full article.