Where can I find recording artists who have MP3s available for download?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnatune is transparent about their artist payment system and offers downloads in several formats, all without DRM.

Just bought Yeasayer's new live album (FLAC and mp3) directly from their site. You can also buy their studio releases there. Nine Inch Nails offers their music for digital download directly from their own site. Those are the only 2 off the top of my head, but I'm interested in seeing other people's suggestions.

"I'm looking for sites maintained by specific artists, rather than aggregate sites such as last.fm or Amazon's MP3 download page."I know this doesn't exactly fit the criteria above, but check out http://www.noisetrade.com. It's a site that allows artists to upload their music and make it available for download for free, while giving downloaders the option to make a donation of any amount to the artist (80% of which goes to the artist).

http://www.bandcamp.com is the closest you'll come to paying artists directly for their music via paypal. they do take a 10-15% cut of sales, in addition to paypal's cut, but you are paying the artist directly for their music in a digital format.

http://www.grindertool.com/ is the site maintained by John Bergin (of Trust Obey, C17H19NO3, lots of other industrial/darkwave projects). The 'music archive' has free downloads of nearly everything he's worked on, as far as I can tell - about 17 albums and a bunch of non-album tracks and remixes.

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/store/downloads/ is a perennial http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/search.mefi?site=mefi&q=coulton.

bandcamp is the closest you'll come to paying artists directly for their music via paypal. This may be true as far as talking about organizations that represent some sort of layer between the artist and the fan - which almost by definition are going to need to take some sort of transactional cut to keep the lights on, but I think the poster is asking about DIY artists who are hosting their own downloads so that all your money goes to them except whatever they pay for the bandwidth. This is not to bag on Bandcamp which seems to be a fair deal in terms of taking a cut for providing hosting and a pass-through on purchases, better than the major download retailers. For what it's worth I have been noticing artists I previously tagged as going a DIY route with selling downloads transitioning to BandCamp, examples are http://yourheart.bandcamp.com/ (more on him below) and http://music.fromabasement.com/, so Bandcamp must be doing something right. I have researched this very question on and off in service of a very poorly maintained blog so this question has no provided an opportunity to clean up a particular folder in my disastrous bookmarks fiasco. Andrew Huang makes his "http://www.songstowearpantsto.com/" songs-on-request songs available through a download transaction outfit called https://www.payloadz.com/. I emailed with him quite a few years ago and he seemed pretty satisfied with that service at the time. He also does a subscription thing through what he calls "http://suturesound.com/" where he just emails you monthly links to downloads which delivers a ton of music for the dollar (I've been a member going on a couple years). http://www.nin.com/ has been doing this for a while, ever since Reznor got off his contract. http://www.posterchildren.com/store.php were, well, poster children for DIY, no-corporate philosophy long before the internet had much anything to do with music. Looks like they use Payloadz as well for the transactions. http://www.superadmusic.com/god/ used to do a DIY thing and now that I look them up again it look like they are using a "Facebook Friendly" transaction service called http://www.facebook.com/OWJO. I don't know anything about this so grain of salt, but they GIAA did have a DIY mentality before so that service might be worthwhile. (In a similar vein MySpace has a service for selling called http://www.myspace.com/snocap but I heard a lot of complaints about it, particularly when they apparently instituted a $30 annual fee on members regardless of their sales. No idea what's up with them now, MySpace seems like such an afterthought anyway these days.) http://www.davidbyrne.com/music/cds/everything_that_happens/index.php put out an album a while back, the transaction is managed in some way via a company called http://www.topspinmedia.com/blog/, they bill what they sell as a "software platform". They have a "for fans" link on their page so might be a path to more music discovery. Metafilter's own Brad Sucks aka frenetic http://www.bradsucks.net/projects/bsdds/ and you can buy his stuff (which is really good) direct from http://www.bradsucks.net/store/. I asked http://ask.metafilter.com/74110/Whos-doing-DIY-music-download-sales a couple years back, I haven't reviewed these links in a while so I don't know how current they are, but a number to explore there. I wish there was a great blog or something of just this, but I haven't found it yet (maybe in this thread), because I think artists using this model deserve to be much better promoted (and I think bigger names like Radiohead, Byrne and Eno, and Reznor could probably be enticed to promote such a venue if it was well done and got somewhat established. Step 4 profit, yeah yeah. Nice idea though. Thanks for asking again.

Duh, forgot Coulton. He manages the transactions via an outfit called http://www.e-junkie.com/ incidentally.

Ani DiFranco has many, but not all, albums in http://store.righteousbabe.com/departments/details/music available in mp3 form.