I've downloaded a couple of "full album" mp3's, and some of them are badly corrupted, others only mildly corrupted(ok - one or two had no faults to be fair).

There are usually small gaps at random spots in the songs, a tenth of a second missing here and there.
Or some strange "beeps" that shouldn't be there.

Is this due to something happening with the download, or what?

The last one was the whole DIDO album. It was encoded at 160kbps, which is not too bad.

And the download went at a speed of about 30KBytes/sec., no stops.

Still the mp3 has gaps in it here and there.

If this is a problem with the source file, it would be nice if people could "clean up" their mp3's, delete the duff ones, and not share ones that are corrupt.

Or are record companies deliberately putting up mp3's of low quality?

Not sharing duff files also goes for programfiles, of course.

-Check your files before sharing!