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As some above have said, (and I'm not trying to be redundant) there are many other places to get MP3s, most of which existed before Napster.
Oth.net used to be an amazing source for them by listing searchable FTP sites full with albums and singles. There's always other less dependable websites like AudioGalaxy.com and LycosMP3. There are all BIG, well-known WWW sites, which, although not quite 100% reliable are well established. This does not cover the thousands of pages you can find if you go to Hotbot and search for 'mp3'.
Then, of course, there's IRC. Here again, there are hundreds of communities across dozens of servers all working on one thing: getting/trading MP3s. (My recommendation is to try some of the IRC servers on the Eris Free Network).
Then of course, you've got other Napster-like clients like GNUtella, FreeNet, and Globalscape's CuteMX (most of these share more than MP3 files).
And college students will always have the trusty, reliable LANs where students share their large collections.

Ok, so you knew this already. Bottom line: MP3 is not going away, not now, and especially not at the hands of the RIAA. If they are only half as smart as their lawyers are blockheaded, they would work with some of these companies, as well as organizations like the Frauenhoffer Institute to develop a replacement for the MP3 file format. One that maybe sounds twice as good for half the file size, so you can get 320kbps encoded songs for 3MB or so. New technology is the way to fight MP3. If enough people think it's worth it to pay $0.50 for a song that sounds twice as good and can be downloaded in half the time, guess what? They'll be more likely to get that song as opposed to an .mp3 file. Relatively secure encoding already exists. The band Phish released MP3s that you could listen to for free three times, then a window popped up that reuqired you to enter a credit card number and pay some small amount of money to continue listening to the song (apparently, an executable was appended to the WAV file before it was encoded... You couldn't remove this prompt, or extract a WAV file with WinAmp).

If Lars is reading this, spend money on getting new media developed, not on paying your lawyers. You may win against Napster, but not against MP3.

So, your gigabytes of MP3s just became useless with this device - gotta do it all over again.

Check out AudioGalaxy for some reviews and thoughts about these players - this is definitely the future of portable MP3's. Let's not kid ourselves, the Flash RAM option is ridiculous unless we suddenly find a way to make those cards ultra-cheap - and I don't see that happening.

The other way is the CD MP3 player, but that has its own problems - it's no longer skip-free. On the other hand, all those MP3 CDs you already have should work on those.

For now, the cheapest and most effective solution is to get a CD burner and a Discman - you can burn anything you want, blank CDs are less than a $1 a piece (in the US anyway), you can get a Discman for under $50 nowadays as well - and a CD burner has other uses as well, so you don't lose money there.

audiogalaxy has a cool client which does bascially the same things as Napster. Their service is small enough that it hasn't been banned yet.
Also note that they are still in beta and searches can take awhile at peak times.

Naw. It only takes this long for the inexperienced. You can start off on audiogalaxy looking for a particular band and then run into sites with hundreds of cds in the same genre. I only do this maybe a couple of hours a month and I have a pretty big collection. I have a 200+ legit cd collection to supplement this as well, though I won't pretend like I'm only downloading mp3's before buying cd's (though I do this frequently). Sometimes there are just one or two good songs on cd's but they aren't worth the 18-22 CDN. It is nice downloading and listening to future releases (usually 3 weeks - 1.5 months before their actual store release).

Note that the recording industry hasn't seen profits tail off as mp3's became popular. I'm not advocating piracy "because I think it doesn't hurt anyone", or "because all those musicians are incredibly overpaid" -- but seriously, they should overstate the effect mp3's has. I have all the cd's of my favorite bands. All my friends who frequently pirate music as well have vast cd collections that are in the hundreds to thousands.
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I download mp3s _almost_ constantly, and run into these kinds of sites _almost_ every day.

The majority seem to have an incredibly good range of music, but are extremely difficult to get into. Let me explain ...

Firstly, the hosts have their site listed in an mp3 FTP search engines (such as audiogalaxy.com). Once their site is displayed (showing the username and password), I login via FTP. The first message displayed, is usually one saying that this is a 'looking only' account, and for 'leech access', one has to go to their website www.blah.whatever.etc.etc.

Once at the website, there are banners at the top of the page, and a message at the bottom. The message says to "click on the top banner, and the fourth word on the page is the login, then click on the second banner, and the second last word on the page is the password." Both of these banners (of course) are porn sites. The host obviously gets paid a few cents every time someone clicks on them.

Next, having finally got the 'leech' username and password, FTP to the server can be attempted. Now comes the fun part ... after all that, upon login a message is displayed saying, "there are too many users currently logged into that account. Please try again later", and I'm instantly logged out.

This doesn't happen once or twice, it happens 90% of the time.

What I don't understand, is why the porn site keep paying them.

I have been using the BORG mp3 search engine ever since it was #mpeg3 (EFNet) official search engine. Since then the author has greatly improved it, and even aquired a full domain name for it. http://www.audiogalaxy.com is the one I'm talking about.