I've never used P2P either, and I dumped all my IM clients except Yahoo because pretty near all off my contacts have disappeared over the years.
Back when I was on dialup, my music collection was mostly MIDs, which are (usually) free and quite often excellent quality, if you don't mind living without vocal arrangements. I did make one exception back then for a specific set of MP3s -- some high school in Ohio had years ago done their own production of Godspell and still had online files which included among other things most (not all) of the tracks from the soundtrack album and from the Broadway version. So I patiently downloaded what they had, one or two files per evening.
After I got broadband, one good source I discovered for "real" music was eMusic -- for something like $15 a month, you could download up to 75 files a month. And in some cases that was a real steal -- Carlin's "On Campus" album, for instance, was a single huge file rather than separate tracks, so it counted as only a single download. I gave up on them and ended my subscription after a year or so mainly because they concentrated on "indie" labels rather than "names", so I pretty much exhausted their supply of what interested me after a while.
