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Ever since the invention of the mix tape,  sharing of music has been one of the best ways for people to find out about new music.   The original Napster brought this sharing to a new level, where one could browse the music collection of any one of millions of people.  If you found someone in the Napster network that had similar tastes in music, it was easy to look through their entire music collection and see what they may be listening to that you didn't know about. It was a great way to explore new artists.  Now of course, this avenue of music discovery has been shutdown, but there are a number of new services out there that are helping to fill this social gap left by the shutdown. Sites like last.fm, SoundFlavor, MusicStrands,  and the iTunesRegistry, provide ways for people to explore new music by finding others that have similar music tastes.  A new report: Consumer Taste Sharing is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture, (first seen on the Digital Music WebLog), provides lots of data to back up the assertion that music sharing is very important to the music industry.  Authors Mike McGuire and Derek Slater suggest that online music services will be more desireable if they provide better ways for users to share music (or at least share their taste in music) with others.  They predict that in a few years, 25% of all online music sales will be as a result of people sharing their music tastes with each other, but before this can happen, copyright holders will need to provide more flexible DRM and licensing rules.