I am generally curious if there’s a trend away from “hotlinking” to mp3s on other sites, e.g., now that some musicians are offering sharable players on one hand, and since other musicians are still using locked-down players (like MySpace) on the other.

I don’t have a good enough sense of this trend / counter-trend with the files I publish, but I am seeing some undesirable hotlinking to those files. Delicious could be a good case for watching the trend of legitimate hotlinking, but it looks like not that many people use it for linking to music.