> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there

So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.

I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.

They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.

No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.