Cut the audio then!
I was thinking of a board were people could simply post every new release and rate it; something similar to what happens on this forum, but with rating.
Then everyone is free to download (from archive.org) or not.
listeners seem to like podcast. i don't realy use them. rss without enclosure fits my needs....but i am not a typical listener.
it's not the volume traffic that sucks, volume traffic is a fine thing. the more you have, the more money you get (at least if you are above one tb/a day and speak with the isp's).
the problems are the hits (actualy not music hits...) and the page generation time. to keep this low, it needs a lot of cpu and ram.
I'm not trained about the technical details... maybe using something else than drupal could help? Does the current system use ajax ?
I have found this platform: http://meneame.net/ do you know it?
cchits is cool, I didn't know it.
It gets near to what I'm looking for, although it lists tunes and not whole releases.