They promised we could “listen forever,” but it appears Listen4Ever.com has gone off line.

The record companies ganged up on the pirate Web site, filing lawsuits against giant ISPs, trying to force them to block access to the China-based Web site, which offered free copies of copyrighted CDs. The crush of publicity, apparently, caused the Listen4Ever.com servers to crash, or convinced the current site hosts to take it off line. Either way, it isn’t accessible at the moment, and according to one report, hasn’t been available since Friday.

I never tried accessing the site until today. I tried through my normal DNS configuration and kept getting a “domain not found” error, so I reconfigured my DNS settings, putting in the IP addresses for a couple of alternate public domain servers, and seemed to be getting passed by ISP at that point, but the site seemed to be down.

Maybe bringing the site down by swamping it with traffic was the RIAA’s evil scheme all along. How many people knew about the site before the lawsuit was filed? How many know about it now?

While I don’t necessarily support music piracy, I do support any efforts to break the major-label hold on music. Hopefully, the Net will keep finding ways to route around the RIAA’s heavy-handed, major-label supporting, artist-destroying tactics.