DEFENDING THE PIG – OINK CROAKS

168 thoughts on “DEFENDING THE PIG – OINK CROAKS”

1. This is a great article about this unfortunate event. But like you said, it can only get better from here, right? Thanks for your positivity!

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3. Thank you for putting this so well. Oink was paradise for anyone with a real interest in music and I am basically in a shock statement. I think the mistake they did was to let in the more mainstream stuff, a site like Oink without the latest chartbusters would have been just as good and would have stayed out of the pigs radar.

4. good point Nick – all the news sites mention leaks of “60 major pre-release albums”, so the mainstream stuff appears to be the primary reason for such a big sting operation (Interpol!).

   And this is why Soulseek continues i think, since it is weighed towards music with a less high profile (aka music without sharkish lawyers trying to squeeze more profit)

5. I’m really getting pissed off at all the totally inaccurate media coverage of this…! “extremely lucrative” my ass.

   interesting take on this, rupture. I am one of the people who bought yr Andy Moor CD, but I didn’t upload it (I was a member). 🙂 Your comments about Radiohead are spot on too.

6. that was untimely ..especially after you spent a couple of hours showing me how fantastic it was ….hopefully they resurface as ‘grunt’ or ‘snort’ in a few weeks …nicely written piece …send it to the wire ..they need a good writer …

7. Thanks for the excellent article. This situation really is a Catch 22. I know for a fact that if it were not for technologies like Soulseek or Oink, I would not have the same musical appreciation as I do now.

   My tastes would largely be subject to whomever had the best marketing.

   These times of cheap distribution are never as simple as either side wants to make it out to be, but I have a feeling that the people with the money will eventually wrestle this (relatively) new technology to ground, and force everyone to follow along. We see signs of this every few months or so (i.e. major distributors adopting digital distribution services).

   My main beef with digital is that I really can’t justify to myself paying money for files. $10 for a bunch of mp3s and the cover art just doesn’t do it for me. Sadly, I feel I am in the minority.

   These are wild times.

8. This is an amazing post – the way you see things is enlightening to say the least. Greetings from a fan (who got one of your releases from Oink, and bought it afterwards). Sad day for music, to be honest – oink actually made (at least a few) people care about artists and their work.

9. Just in time on spot comments, brought to you by blogging musicians! But really, this is how people could counter (the gibberish of a) media event like this, saying it’s miles away from a crime in the moral sense. And ask those who blame the copyright infringers: what if there was done a lot to preserve “endangered” music records (well there is enough talk of preserving digital heritage, so!) by sharing it to other people? if it was helping the lesser known artists to get publicity (“hey i d/loaded a album of them and i’m definitely going to the concert, it’s ace”), or even to sell records? there _were_ people who were still willing to buy music even though they dowloaded it. …
   Aah but should rather comment what Rupture wrote: great work what you do here, keep it up.

10. Many people use the excuse ‘I was trying before buying’ – but I can make that claim hand on heart. I’ve been spending over £200 a month on CDs, and at the same time Oink allowed me to try stuff out, experiment and also obtain releases that have been long out of print. Stuff that I didn’t fancy handing some guy on eBay £40 for.

    It was a frustrating experience to see prereleases get downloaded heavily, but it just highlighted that something is fundamentally wrong with the industry as it stands now.

11. Right on, as usual. Thanks for so eloquently saying what so many of are thinking.

12. Excellent post. This is by far the most insightful and thought-provoking blog I’ve seen today regarding OiNK’s demise. I completely agree with you on your point that the next OiNK will be sturdier and more multiple. Maybe the next generation will follow indietorrents’ example and keep all of the torrents RIAA-safe. Keep it posi!

13. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the band Get Him Eat Him or not, but they went one step further — they day after finishing their new album they posted it on OiNK with lyrics, credits and full art scans. What does that tell you? They’re on a label (Absolutely Kosher), a label associated with the RIAA none-the-less…tell me that they didn’t think they were taking a good, positive step for themselves – for their band. They wanted a version of their album that was the ‘proper’ version online because they knew it would be their anyway – give someone the chance to hear your art, who doesn’t want coverage?

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15. very nice analysis jace, thanks. i’m struck amidst all of this by the difficulty of providing an answer for artists who ask, “how will i make money now?” it seems like that’s the core dilemma, and i wish we could come up with an answer that wasn’t “by letting the record companies stick their wooden shoes into the gears of the future.” maybe if we could, then the record companies wouldn’t be able to drive this whole discussion and copyright law could come up to date.

    i agree with kemble that i just can’t see shelling out $$ for a bunch of files that seem so…intangible. but i guess as a dj i may be one of the few who still cares about easy access to the information and the object without a computer mediating it.

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17. Nicely said.

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19. to be honest, i rarely downloaded stuff off of oink, my connection doesnt handle BT well

    but it was an incredible library to browse through to look at albums, and users reactions to those albums.

    as well, it was a great reference for looking up artists i was not that familiar with
    one thats not trying to sell me anything, has no gimmicky advertisements, and offers vast amounts of information about every album they’ve released, who they’ve colaberated with, and often links to the artists website, etc… (as well as offering a .torrent)

    try to find a mention of an artist on google thats not attempting to sell you something

20. nice to read an artist really standing up for music-lovers rights! thanks for that! not that i ever made use of oink – but i am really indebted to soulseek for my musical education. i would then like to make one remark on what you write about soulseeks thievery: soulseek has an option for making user lists, by which means you can definitely control who has or has no access to the files on your hd, notwithstanding whether the other user has or hasn’t paid for special dl privileges… for what its worth: i know quite a few artists and label owners (of course not the ‘big names’, but those belonging to the more ‘alternative’ scene (where making money of your music is not an issue because they probably never will make enough money to live off with their music anyway) who themselves are on soulseek…

21. Great article, but it really sucks that the site is no more.
    It was my #1 jazz resource.. there is not 1 single recordstore with a vast collection like oink’s.. damn! By the way, I’m a professional artist myself, record a lot of stuff, I don’t care if it sells as long as people are pleased with it. Art is emotion, not money. OiNK, rip.

22. jace, this is really an excellent post. you highlight many of the great things about oink, and your positivity is appreciated.

    i know some musicians that used oink to promote their own music (as alluded to in the comments), and i’d actually venture to say that the downfall of oink may actually end up hurting a good number of smaller artists (less exposure as a result..)

    what’s so frustrating about it to me is that of course the IFPI (read: RIAA) shut it down, yet the great thing about oink was how much non-mainstream music was up there. it served as a key aggregation point for new, good music in a variety of genres.

    it also had some really fascinating data about who was downloading what (charts in various genres) that you’d think would have been valuable to many in the industry. as a blogger friend of mine said, “the music industry should study oink.”

    i do agree that the newer and better oink will come around, although who knows when. the pirate bay has already said that they’re not going to save this one — they can’t save everything. i guess i’ll just have to keep waiting.. (and hope that maybe someone will incorporate donate to the band links in the process.)

23. I don’t appreciate being called anal-retentive or British.

    oink invites

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25. there are a few obscure bands whose records I have paid for in the past, and have played so many times they skip that I cannot easily find anymore that were very easily accessible on oink, and just out of curiosity today I went to see if I could find some of these records on other torrent sites, even sites folks are forwarding others to start using instead, and I can’t find them. Oink had a great comprehensive catalog of really hard to find stuff that had nothing to do with record label fat cats at all, and now it’s going to be just as hard to find that stuff again.

26. You have probably already seen it, but if not it’s worth trying to get an invitation to IndieTorrents (www.indietorrents.com). It only shares music on non-RIAA labels to try to avoid legal attention, but otherwise it works on a similar basis to Oink’s. And as far as I’m concerned, the most interesting stuff is rarely on the major labels anyway.

27. i think youre a little off base when it comes to soulseek. ive been using it for years and i have paid for the download priviledges like once or twice. its not even that much better with download priviledges. also, if you see someone jumping your queue, you can ban them. i think most people dont even donate. most people share “list only”. you are using a service for free, they should have some sort of way to pay for the cost of everything theyre doing. i think having people donate and giving them an incentive is a good way of doing that. im sure if you ask most people, they wouldnt really care if people jump their queue, since theyre keeping the service up and running by donating.

28. I can’t believe I have never heard of this site. Maybe because it was invite only, I passed it up once, ages ago.

    Now I feel awful for having missed it. It would have been my favorite site in the entire world.

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31. In a strange twist of fate, I found your DJ mixes via oink! I never did actually buy anything from you but I sure did enjoy the tunes. I also turned a bunch of people on to your mix…maybe they eventually bought something?

    I feel sorta guilty, but if you played a show in my town, I would totally go.

    Here’s to hoping we don’t all get a supoena!

32. The bizarre experience I shared with friends was that oink was often more convenient than hunting for albums we actually own. Did I want to dig through a box of discs in the next room for my copy of Special Gunpowder, or did I want to spend five minutes to download a copy in the bitrate I wanted?

33. Thanks so much for this article. It is as close to the truth as we’ll see. I’m one of the audiophiles you mentioned, and the record industry never lost any of my money because of OiNK. Quite the opposite… on my last trip to the record store, I bought 4 CDs by bands that I learned of through the OiNK forums. That’s money that wouldn’t have gone to those artists without OiNK. No RIAA or similar can say that they’ve done for music and musicians what OiNK did.

    You should try to get published in a mainstream publication… I’m sure that the music press will report this story, and this article sums up the opposition to the RIAA position.

34. Great read! You hit the nail right on the head!

    I “was” a member and it will be missed dearly

    You are an artist who sells their work, and you still “get IT”

    two thumbs up

35. Well, it’s a pretty bad analogy, to be honest. The privilege system does not amount to “controlling” access to another user’s files, and people in any given person’s user list are given priority in the queue list. It’s always been that way. If a user “doesn’t like having their files accessed” by someone who donates, they are fully capable of banning whoever they do not approve of jumping up in their queues. There’s always the option of simply not sharing at all, or sharing with a user-list only, and you can still download, at the discretion of the individuals you download from. If you don’t share back on a BitTorrent site (at least the private networks), you’re flagged as a ‘leecher’ pretty quickly and given the boot.

    Regarding users who “never see any of this money,” the argument is kind of silly. You are somehow entitled to be paid as a user for sharing files because the network should be thanking you for doing so? Is that how it should have been on Oink, too, or any other site for that matter?

    “I put up with the ads in [whatever piece of software]. I should receive a cut of the revenue for allowing them to display on my computer.”

    “i uploded the nu cristina agwileria to oink’s cd… u shud gimme a few bux 4 doing that work”

    Unless you have come across some free service that allows you to host whatever (be it a promotion, or something that hosts something simple like photos), having a site/network costs money. That’s the bottom line, and even those who provide a free service are doing it through ad revenue or the like. The whole purpose of the donation system was to spare people the ads, popups, spyware, and what have you… because when that’s there, people complain about it, too. It was put in place so that people could choose whether or not they wanted to help to keep the network running. I’m not sure what people think webhosting costs per month, per computer, but you can rest assured that it’s typically well into the thousands and tens of thousands per month for larger networks. Money then goes off to cover legal consultation fees, pays to assist Soulseek user albums off the ground, pays a fairly substantial portion of Lab30 festivals… so if you happen to be an artist that’s had your trip covered to be there, you’re accepting and spending that ‘blood money.’

    Many people here have MySpace accounts, too… how many see a cut of their revenue? They make a huge amount more than Soulseek ever has or will. What about Facebook, with an investor guessing the 2007 revenue to be approx. $100,000,000 (yes, one hundred million dollars). Should the people making add-ons for that be getting a cut? I mean, $100 million, they couldn’t possibly be using all of that… where could it go, right? What do they mean, ‘tiny profits?'”

    For users who say they don’t actually ‘use’ Soulseek to download anything… that they just use it to chat with friends; that service exists at a cost, as well. There’s NO other service out there that will allow you to do so for “free” in the true sense of the word. Nobody out there has been that philanthropic. You want to use MSN to talk to someone, you have their ads floating around on your machines… the people advertising are the ones who have “donated” to have that “privilege” to have “access to your computer” with their ads on there. If you’re using a third party application in which that has been cut out (which could be comparable to Nicotine [a 3rd party Slsk client], etc…) and allegedly “performs better,” do they get any of that money? Sure don’t… because they’ve cut out the code that makes it. If that’s all suddenly wrong, people have a pretty messed up understanding of basic economics.

    //edits: this was written before the comment regarding options for controlling files was modified in the original post, so that line can be disregarded – it was written as a reply to the quote on matter being posted on the Slsk forums.

36. A more wonderful eulogy to OiNK could not be written.

    OiNK completely changed the way I thought about music and the model of the music industry uses. The site introduced me to dozens of bands I now love and probably never would have heard of otherwise. The majors are fighting an absolutely pointless battle to keep their outdated business model alive. The fact is, file sharing has advanced to the point where it’s easier, faster, and cheaper for both labels and fans to release and obtain music. The smart companies are the ones who are using sites like OiNK to build buzz and get their artists name out there. It’s all so ludicrous. Adapt. Don’t fight the inevitable.

    That “extremely lucrative” quote from the Cleveland police officer is infuriating and shows how little these people understand. If the man was making any money off of OiNK I’d be shocked. My heart goes out to him and anyone else who ends up taking a fall. I hope he makes it out alright.

37. As a long time member of Oink I must say THANK YOU for having a clue. The press talks about pre-releases of mainstream music, but that is not what I used the site for. What I liked about Oink is that it had so much rare, out of print, and all but impossible to find material out there. Well, I am also a music addict (that is my story and I am sticking to it) (Seriously, most people find my legal CD and LP collection to be frightening.), and I like listening to stuff at random.

    Fairly recently, I downloaded a few of your releases. I discovered you because of a split you did with someone else who I also found while randomly downloading music. I haven’t had a chance to seriously listen to your music yet, but I think it is likely that sooner or later I will be purchasing your music.

    Someday, I hope that I will actually make music instead of just talking about how much I want to make music. I had planned on releasing it by posting it to Oink, and hoping that people who recognize me by what I had posted and what I had downloaded would download it just out of curiosity, and I would be happy just to have people listening to it.

    It is still possible to do this without Oink, but Oink was more than a place to download music, it was a community. My taste in music was far from Mainstream when I first joined, but my musical knowledge has grown by leaps and bounds more than would ever be possible, even with unlimited money to buy CDs & Vinyl, without a site like Oink.

    (I chose the name I chose because I have Disposable Heros stuck in my head for some reason.)

38. Oh, and I meant to end my comment by saying something to the effect of “Today was a tragedy for the music industry”

    or maybe “I love anal-retentive Oink admins who happen to be British.”

    I never did donate any money to Oink, and maybe right now I am glad I never did. I might just donate to a legal defense fund, but heck, anyone who loves music should do so. Oink (the site) was something special, and Oink (the person) deserves better than this.

39. Very good article, I completely agree with most of what you are saying, earlier I agreed with everything but I thought about it a lot and realised that your comments in regards to soulseek’s privelege system were a bit incorrect. As Proteus93 stated previously.. the donation system doesn’t fill the programmers pockets with money, unlike oink it puts a lot back into the music community with the likes of Lab30, a festival held in Germany once a year (its on this weekend), funded by soulseek and its users donations, whose line up includes both soulseek artists (I played there last year, and therefore, as Proteus stated, accepted the blood money as my fee) and non-soulseek artists. And also it funds soulseek’s own print record label SLSK Records (not to be confused with the soulseek-artist created Soulseek Records free netlabel).

    So yeah just wanted to point out that the priveleges system isn’t as evil as you make it out to be. But as for the rest of your article, I couldn’t agree more.

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41. An incredibly well written and quite poignant article. I was a member there for a few years and always felt that it was a haven for me to discover new music and rediscover old treasures.

    I will cross-post this article to as many places as possible as I believe it sums up the feelings of all the Oink users and believe that everyone who reads it should do the same. It’s important that as many people as possible find out how wonderful this site was to so many people.

    Oh, and after stumbling across your site, I’ll definitely make the effort to track down more of your stuff 🙂

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43. I used Oink to find out of print records from the 70’s. Where else could you find an archive of these releases? What was that hurting? Oink was helping generate interest for songs that were long forgotten and would still be forgotten without Oink.

    I am so sick and tired of music companies spurring law enforcement to waste resources in an effort to further secure the billions upon billions of dollars you have already made.

    To think this action occurred while DRM free songs are becoming the standard at e-retailers.

    I will never buy another record again from major labels until the record companies keep their hands off the internet and let us share music with friends, like we have been doing since the invention of magnetic tape.

    Get a clue.

44. Thanks for writing this. Your piece seriously cuts through a lot of the bullshit and misinformation that’s been flying around (did you see the BBC piece)?

    I’ve never heard of you before (…sorry, just being honest) but now I’ll probably go out and try to buy something of yours. Music fans have got to stick together…

45. Long live sharing …. RIP OINK … and a great article…

46. You have a very mature understanding of this issue. This makes me want to buy your music. 🙂

    Thanks, I’ll remember the name Dj Rupture.

47. Thanks for your piece, Rupture. As some one else said before, you hit the nail right on the head.

48. “Oink had a great comprehensive catalog of really hard to find stuff that had nothing to do with record label fat cats at all, and now it’s going to be just as hard to find that stuff again.”

    That’s the worst part. The main reason that the ‘fat-cats’ came after oink seems to be hi-profile (often early) releases and bigger, far-reaching mainstream stuff in general. I could care less about most if not all of that stuff. It’s an undeniable fact that oink made previously unavailable music available to a large audience once again. I find some humor (as well as sadness) in the fact that some labels/record companies will not re-issue some material from older artists because it’s not lucrative for them. At the same time, I would imagine that’s what drew many oink loyalists to the site.

    The ‘fat-cats’ can have their mainstream, heavily-advertised artists for themselves. The real fans of music want the music/artists that these ‘gold-diggers’ are refusing to support, promote and give freedom to.

    Sad stuff…

49. Having worked at an indie record store some years back, there’s something to be said about the business oportunities involved with making back-catalog and hard-to-find music available. The store I worked at was in dire-straights for a couple years primarily because of a manager who didn’t have an extensive knowledge of music (nor a willingness to stock ‘deeper’ material). Upon enstating new management, the variety, back-catalogue and rare-titles in stock increased greatly, and…

    Surprise, store profits increased IMMENSELY because of this. The industry typically caters to the ‘lowest-common-denominator’ and produces the least-objectionable-media in the way of mainstream music, but this hasn’t done away with serious music fans. It’s simply pushed them out into the cold, and resultantlly forced them to obtain their music through other avenues. (Be it ebay, file-sharing, the rare ‘good’ record store, etc…)

    Just because the industry ignores this crowd doesn’t mean they are non-existent. If anything, big record companies are losing profits by refusing to cater to the serious music fans’ needs. Until they realize and address this in some way, I feel like this trend will continue. Additionally, they’ll continue to lose potential profits due to their refusal to supplement their formulaic, machine-like-production of faux artists with support for ‘real’ artists and music.

    [Yeah, I know…I’m preaching to the choir.]

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54. it was good while it lasted, but then all good things come to an end, yeah i did have reservations about taking stuff for free, but u have been buying music for 30 odd years..i wont give any more money to corporations..i would rather go see live music and give the bands money direct..

    anyway , all the best everyone..see u all in court..only joking..or am i?

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56. Very nice article, I agree 100% on everything.

    It’s the first time I felt personally ‘affected’ by a site like this getting closed, a lot of my conversations yesterday was about this, and I just really wonder where it all will go from here… Oh well, in so many year’s time physical record companies will probably have become obsolete anyway.

57. well, maybe not on everything, I don’t really agree with the Radiohead comment… surely your solution would have even been more radical, but seeing as there are already a few bands following in their footsteps (e.g. Oasis), I do think in the long run it could really mean a difference…

58. I think as a musician it is very important to expose yourself to many different genres of music. It’s paramount in development and shaping you as a musician. I’m 23 now and I’d say for the last 5 years I’ve been all over so many different types of music. This is something that Oink enabled me to do, I just don’t have the money to experiment with music as it all goes on buying over priced drum equipment and recording gear…

    I’m really gutted that it has come to this, Christmas won’t be the same this year…

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60. good article
    OInk was a place to share thoughts and music in every genre.
    made some good friends that hopefully i will be able to meet at some other place like last.fm
    curious who’s next: demonoid? pirate bay? SLSK?

61. One of the best things about OiNK was that they would allow free downloading during the last week of the year, yet still count your uploads towards your ratio. Sorry Mom, but OiNK’s was the best Christmas present I got last year.

    anal retentiveness was one of oinks greatest strengths, unlike the sloppy unregulated chaos of pirate bay. to be a member of oink felt like you were a citizen of a well-run scandanavian country

62. excellent article!
    never actually used oink myself, i wrote a dissertation on itunes.. and your arguments are well on point!
    its just terrible that the music industry is so greedy and well never, take on efficient models like this..

63. I miss it tremendously already. from someone who poured hard earned money into the industry for years with minimal kickbacks, OiNK was a way for me to test the waters, to see if you really should purchase/support anything from a band or just walk away from it. It was also a place, like rupture said, where it was music shared by audiophiles- people who cared about the QUALITY of music, from both substance to bit rate!(ITunes just released 256! Oooooo!~pathetic) most of all though, it was a place to get music and feel safe from any lonely douchebag who wanted to create havoc and spread viruses. no more shitty, virus ridden files? sure! to sum up, once again, like the napster fallout, we have to regroup and follow up with something better. I’ll be there sharing- will you?…

64. still sad.
    thank you.
    linked these words.

65. Brilliant article, very well done.

    I am looking forward to the next Oink, the internet and the music industry is expanding faster than it can be contained by a few corrupt music publishers the rapidly fading power of interpol.

    I look forward to a bright future – even if a load of us get arrested before it gets here – thats always the way 😉

66. It will be a while… everyone is scared with everything that has happened. Nobody wants to start a site right now because they see what happens to the owner. It will definitely take time.

67. no this is not true — many are scrambling to restart oink, it shouldn’t be long at all.

68. Thanks for writing this article, you expressed so many of my thoughts much more clear than I ever could.

    I discovered so many great bands from the past and the present that I would have no other way of finding if it weren’t for OiNK.

    How many of the people that used OiNK really cared about pre-releases of crappy top 40 pop bands anyways?

69. Thank you! What a wonderful, thoughtful article.
    It will take a lot of time, and there will be many “casualties” of brave pioneers, but one day it is the RIAA who WILL croak.
    This will be a happy day indeed.

70. Great great GREAT article Rupture. It’s so refreshing to hear a musician saying these things. You’re the future of music dude. Keep up the good work.

71. Well spoken.

72. i’ll have a t-shirt

73. OINK USERS ‘SHOULD BE VERY, VERY SCARED’…

74. Great article. I seriously might buy some of your products now because you have written so well, so well in fact that I hope you wont mind me quoting you in my review of OiNK for my ENC1101 class.

    Cheers.

75. I appreciate the article. It’s well written, and addresses a lot of the “WTF” issues I encountered in IFPI’s press release.

76. I love you, this is the best thing I’ve seen written.

77. ready to upload 200 GB of oink gleaned rarities…where to?

78. “…Someone who had purchased it directly from me turned around and posted it online, for free…”
    That was me, for the record.
    Your perspective is refreshing and if you do start selling shirts, I’m right there in line. Not to mention new music, name a price. It’s hard to knock services like Oink when I’ve been trying to think of how I would have been exposed to your work had I not downloaded a TB6 compilation several years ago. I still can’t imagine how.

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82. So where shall I go now that OiNK is down, to search for “DJ Rupture” to figure out whether I like your music or not?

    But as you said, you now have 180 000 hungry OiNKers running loose, still demanding the best at whichever site they land at: Rarities, lossless … or even 24bits sampled at 96kHz. Collectors who would insist on having every version of -say- Sgt Pepper that was ever made and in every format. That is going to have influence outside the sphere of old OiNKians.

    And let’s face it: anything less than lossless (FLAC, APE, OFR, EavPack) is a joke with today’s download speeds. Who needs to be able to download a week of listesning every hour online anyway?

83. I wonder who will employ OiNK when he gets out of jail. I don’t think he’ll be unemployable. Rather the opposite. 180 000 people owe him gratitude, and some of them might just both need his skills and have the money to pay for them. Out of 180 000 … just see the great and overpaid job “DVD-Jon” from Norway landed …

84. There are some bands that if I had never downloaded their music from oink or soulseek and listened to it, I would have never bothered making it a point to go pay money to see them live and end up buying some of their merch.

85. Rupture, you’re brilliant! I loved your article, but I must note one thing: pre-release mixes did often get posted and were acceptable. Just as one example I remember from the many discussions there, someone was complaining about the mastering of the Red Hot Chili Peppers Californication, which led to someone posting the original, unmastered leak of the album which featured alternate versions of some of the tracks. In mentioning Radiohead, you could also easily get the original, unmastered, and significantly different enough to gain status, version of their Hail To The Thief album. Of course, these releases were required nonetheless to meet Oink’s stern standards, so you’d never see things like the Beastie Boys instrumentals from Paul’s Boutique or other lower bitrate or cassette sourced releases, but I always found them elsewhere as I’m sure everyone else has.

    Regardless, Rupture, thanks for nailing the topic so eloquently. And you’re completely correct, the next “Oink” will be better, stronger and more efficient. It will also be harder to crack. I hope it will be a little less snobbish though.

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87. This is absolutely beautiful and insightful, thank you for making your views available for me to read.

88. Im glad this article is getting the attention it deserves, I was tiring of some of the ex-oikers points of view and sense of entitlement thats starting to show up.

    I wish now that the execs are taking time to read all the discussions that the whole RIP-OiNK issue is bringing up, but i doubt they will change. Just think, even if you didn’t have a deep understanding of what OiNK was, a day reading the comments all over the internet would give you a pretty good business case for a new working model, where everythings already setup (except the laws and desire to change)

    As Putt’s Law states – “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”

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90. I love you so much. And I have never even heard of you before this article. I wonder what your music sounds like? Ironic that it was not just OiNK, but OiNK’s demise, that introduced me to your name.

    Viva la OiNK!

91. Well written DJ Rapture. I was an early member of OiNK, joining when the site was barely 2 months old. It started as a cozy place for audiophiles to share music at a good quality bitrate (192) at that time. I saw the membership creep up as SuprNova bit the dust. Thanks to OiNK, I found a lot of new music I liked from struggling artists and supported them by purchasing their music from their websites. I would have never discovered them if it wasn’t for OiNK. There were many more members who did the same, so the artists did benefit. OiNK was not just about downloading pirated music for free, it was also about supporting the artists. The road to the OiNK’s demise came when the site was no longer a well-kept “secret” after every John, Jane, Dick and Harry on the internet started asking, trading, begging, and even selling, invites in order to get into the site to download the “free” music that was there. R.I.P OiNK… Oct 23, 2007… The day the digital music died.

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93. Not a downloader myself, and never heard of Oink, but I’m glad I got your perspective on it. Thanks.

    IK

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95. I’m glad to see someone whose output was affected by OiNK supporting it.

    Also, I’m glad you pointed out the falsehoods and ironies of BBC’s report.

    thanks for writing this.

    Question- do you think OiNK (or any other services for that matter) actually helped you sell more records? I mean, you’re not Britney Spears: OiNK et. al. must have been wonderful free press for you..right?

96. Dont get me wrong but I was kinda touched from your articel.

    RIAA, SPLIF and how the heck all of them are called should do
    better then just bust these great sides. In the beginning, find the
    real criminals in their own rows.

    I am a downloader too but if something is great done or it pleases me I go to the store and buy it. Or better I try to pay the artist directly. I just hate those middlemen and not only in the music section.

    I never was on Oink but I loved lokitorrent. They had great stuff and the comunity was big. I even paid them $50 for the lawyer expenses as they
    were on the way to get busted. But as you probably know, it didnt help.

    Hope someone will inform me about the new “oink”-side because I will
    commit my whole bandwide for such work.

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99. A very well written article, and a pleasure to read. Though I just wanted to point out some inaccuracy regarding your comment:

    “this is strangely ironic, since Oink would strip user privileges if they were caught circulating unfinished or unofficial album versions”

    Unfortunately this was untrue, I had contacted the oink moderators on numerous occasions regarding the upload of single-file “dubplates” from drum & bass artists, each time the response was hostile and uncalled for. The spreading of these tunes is completely immoral, the site was a on the whole a nice community of music lovers, most of whom loved to buy as much of the music they loved as they could, only this could allow the .flac format uploads after all. However if a “dubplate” becomes too widespread, it’s not uncommon for a label to drop the tune before release, or for the artist to be unable to get it signed whatsoever. This unfortunately was oink’s major downfall, the users were mainly music lovers and loved to support the artists, the moderators did not. As much of a shame as it was to see it go, I felt that karma finally caught up with them.

100. I found the “more than 60 pre-release albums” quite interesting. If you ever looked at the timestamps of torrent posts on Oink, they were getting a couple of hundred a day. Pre-release or even zero-day was obviously not the focus.

101. Simply summed up everything I was thinking when I found out oink was shut down… only much better articulated than anything I could have written. I also love your music… and your post actually makes me want to buy it.

     Peace…

102. Just wow! Great article.

     You have the facts much more accurate than the press (though still not perfect). There is a lot to understand about bit torrent. Unfortunately the press is spreading a TON of mis-information on a global scale as they report about this event.

103. Great article. Thanks for this.

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105. Great article.

     OiNK was like “future radio” for me. Really, unless you want to surf myspace or last.fm all day streaming music (god save us), or look around for a bunch of podcasts that hopefully suit your taste, there really is no other way to listen to roughly 90% of what was on OiNK (unless you go buy it, and a lot of the time that wasn’t even an option). I will rarely buy something I haven’t already heard and OiNK was really one of my only sources to even attempt to hear certain types of music. Some albums stuck, some albums didnt, but being able to listen to them time and again is what prompted me to go to the record store and buy them.

     I guess now I will have to resort to “white-label 12″s that cost 8-pounds ($16.38!) in London shops and only have 2 songs on them,” or in this case, $16.83 + shipping from OZ (which is probably another $20)! So Ridiculous….

     As much as I hated how much time I wasted on OiNK, I know I will miss it. Perhaps this is a sign for me to be more productive; a race until the next OiNK pops up 🙂

     ps – I hear what you are saying about Radiohead, but I still commend them for offering the album up at next to nothing (regardless of the crap/fake looking website ;)). I was so pissed when I saw people trying to up THAT to OiNK!

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107. Well written article. I was an OiNK member and am extremely saddened to see it go. I’ve been able to get so many hard-to-find albums and live recordings (Oh the SBDs!) from there in the past 2 or so years I’ve been a member.

     It’s truly criminal for the labels to be doing this. There is no way that some 200,000-odd people were causing a one-third drop in album sales over the past 6 years, which is their justification for “combating piracy”. People are obviously losing interest, and for good reason. There’s a reason I don’t listen to OTA radio. It sucks, with a few exceptions (i.e. NPR & college stations).

     The labels can’t see their own well-deserved extinction. The only thing record labels are any good for is marketing and publicity. You can only polish a turd so much. Besides the fact that most of what is produced is total shit, their real nightmare (and that of other entertainment firms) that many of the countries in the developing world don’t exactly enforce intellectual property laws (I’m looking at you China) which is really where the money is now since the market in N America and Europe isn’t getting much bigger and the room for raising the price of a CD is negligible at best.

     I’d imagine that what will happen is that the record companies will start to demand a cut of merch and concert sales once album sales have slowed enough, at which point the infrastructure for marketing and distribution digitally will be fully mature, the artists will simply say fuck you to the labels, and they’ll all be wiped out. Industries that outlive their ability to grow (or even maintain) die. You don’t really see too many ice block trucks anymore, do you?

     The only way they’ll survive is if they go (mostly) completely digital, allow people to listen to full albums in full quality before buying, and eliminate DRM technologies. Somehow, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

     In the meantime, I am supporting artists in three ways: buying albums directly from them, buying their merch, and buying show tickets.

     One last thing: In reference to the above comment, I was one of the people who d/led the new Radiohead from OiNK. HOWEVER, I only did so because I was unable to access the site to purchase/make a donation for it and didn’t want to wait to hear it. I’ve since bought it for what they would’ve been paid had they gone with a major label and I d/led from iTunes: $1.50. I plan on seeing them when/if they tour again.

108. Oink is actually what introduced me to your music. I’ve since purchased Special Gunpowder and if you’re ever doing it up in the Philadelphia area I’m there. Chalk one up for the pig.

109. I was a long time member of OPP…three years I guess.

     What did OiNK do for me? Nothing short of make me fall in love with music again. This article nails the way I feel. Well put.

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111. I was on OINK for a little over a year, and to me the whole point of it was to share and access music that is/was so far out of print that there was and is no way but OINK to get it. It never occurred to me that these “pre-release” torrents were even on there, because I guess I was too busy trying to find the 2 Fourth Way albums on Harvest (from 1969 and 1970) to care. Either that or my ups of the as-yet-unreissued Alice Coltrane records on impulse! were taking too much of my time.

     See, there’s about a hundred billion albums from the last 60 or so years that for whatever reason will never make it to CD, at least not outside of limited runs in Japan anyway. Some of these albums, whether they be forgotten jazz gems like Grant Green’s “Visions” or the Cannonball Adderley/David Axelrod collaboration “Experience in E”, or the albums singer Gordon Haskell made with Arif Mardin in the 1970s, are IMO essential recordings worthy of surviving into the 21st century so future generations can partake of their brilliance and the light with which they illuminate the human experience as only Music can.

     Unfortunately, the corporations that own these recordings (such as Capitol in the case of the Fourth Way, or Blue Note in the case of Grant Green) don’t view their “holdings” in the light of the cultural continuum or with a view towards preserving the immensely rich cultural heritage of the last 60 years, itself one of the most active and easily the most documented cultural and Artistic period in human history. Sometimes these corporations are so insane that they view the artists who made the music as the enemy… when the leader of the Fourth Way, Mike Nock, came to Capitol in LA to see if he could get their output reissued through a small independent label, he was essentially told to go jump in the nearest lake.

     These corporations view what they have in pure, 100% profit-motivated terms, which means that many, if not most, if not all of these works of Art will be consigned to the dustbin of history and will never again see the light of day. Which means that children of our children’s children will never know the splendor of Alice Coltrane’s sublime “Lord of Lords,” or the heartfelt phrasing and immaculate melodic lyricism of Grant Green’s ending outro solo on his version of “We’ve Only Just Begun” that automatically makes me tear up every time I hear it. And that means that this world, already in danger of cannabalistically consuming itself because the obscene devotion to mendacity and the overcommodification of ideas we see around us, will be even that much more barren and bereft in the future, if there is to be one at all.

     If you believe, as I do, that this planet has become so irrevocably corrupt that Art in general and Music in particular are really all we have left to battle the demons and their desire to see phony Quantity destroy Quality forever, then OINK was the community for you, and you, as I, are very sad to see its demise, especially accompanied as it was by the litany of lies supplied by the copyright cops and their accomplices in the mass media.

112. verbosity and reticence may be forgiven equally and for the same reason perhaps only at a funeral. that was one hell of a eulogy, rupture–what follows here, clearly, isn’t.

     *********

     we’ve all–even jam band fans–had the experience of going to a concert/show, however special, popular, personal, or obscure…and had–to be charitable–the experience of *not* loving certain of the fans as much as the music. eventually we feel we’re too old, do (or don’t do) the wrong (or whatever) drugs, start wearing earplugs, etc…

     either since before we could speak or perhaps as a reaction to our speaking different languages, music has united us–for most of history, this was quite literally. before you could record it, one asshole had to pay a bunch of other assholes to play music so even bigger assholes could come and enjoy it. the music made everyone go to all of this trouble; it was no trouble at all because it was about the music.

     so today we start bands and go on tour and have scenes and go to shows and record albums or play covers or whatever. everyone reading this page has had at least one magical live music moment; i dare say (yes, even grateful dead fans) everyone here has had at least one less than stellar going-to-a-concert moment.

     and here’s the point:

     i never–not for a second–had an experience even *remotely* like that with oink. every experience i ever had on oink was pure music-loving delight: 95% of the time, if i’d heard of something old, new, borrowed, blue, it was guaranteed to be on oink; if it wasn’t, that only made the value of what i was seeking go *up* by comparison. no sifting through tons of fakey false positives, no figuring out the myriad ways in which a band whose name you’ve never seen in print could be mispelled, no paging through hundreds upon hundreds of eagles releases just to get to the department of eagles.

     moreover, we’ve all–former oink users–had the experience of someone saying “do you have x, y, or zed?”–maybe some wicked old stuff, maybe some of that crazy electronic stuff (but oddly enough, never reggae) and–boom!–it’s on oink….there are 20?! seeders?…maybe there is something there….

     yet no amount of background checking, fico scores, testimonials, pabst blue ribbon, or even–direct conversation–could convince me that that caveman-looking dude in the grand funk railroad t-shirt should really be in front of me in line at the battles concert, which may (wtf?) end up being sold out….

     oink really, truly, was an *evolutionary* step forward in our appreciation of music as, fuck it, People–in the same way that google is an evolutionary step forward from the encyclopedia, oxford dictionary, yahoo, or even just the idea of the internet itself *without* google….

     an amazing feat given that our appreciation of music is so intensely personal and collective at the same time….and a feat so seemingly simple to those of us who used it, propelled, as it was, and as we were, by not only the love of music, but the love of the love of music.

     and the most ironic, strange, and sad bit of all, actually, is this: with oink–every minute spent using it, every interaction, however strange or against one’s one prejudices, wonderful–we finally, finally, have the phenomenon of *recorded* music, enjoyed individually and collectively, surpassing in purity, simplicity and beauty the form which brought music to the point where we’d wanna record it in the first place, and it’s the *recording* industry who shut it down….

     no drug in the world could ever make the seemingly awesomest festival with all of my favorite bands and some i’ve never heard of and all of the people there are awesome and i meet thirty new friends or i don’t but at least i don’t have to rise to or fail to rise to the occasion of overcoming my own prejudices or those of others here in this shitty desert, this sweaty club, this frozen wasteland, no substance, no, nothing could make such a musical paradise obtain in reality…..

     i submit that absolutely everything about oink, the stuff they didn’t have, even the stuff they did (young jeezy?), the people i never met and didn’t really even have to ever talk to or interact with or even really upload to if i didn’t want to….all of it was awesome, and all of it was about loving the music in a way–truly, i submit–music ain’t never been loved before.

113. and of course i misspelled ‘misspelled’ in the usual way. =)
     oh but oink is still down =(

114. thank you Linus, hilariously written and right on top of it. You were always my favorite “Charlie Brown” character anyway.

115. As mentioned at that Muddy evening in Ireland.

     Some good SF dealing with economics when there is infinite supply.
     Hugo award winning and published under a creaive commons license.

     http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html#Lobsters

     http://www.accelerando.org/

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118. So Radiohead would be more radical by introducing more friction into the purchasing process and making the downloading easier? What’s wrong with people paying for music?

     They are plenty radical for allowing you to enter £0.00 for the price and download it from a direct connection without the need for extra Bittorrent friction… You just like Oink too much 🙂

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122. http://startsnitching.blogspot.com/2007/10/oink-oink-bitches.html

     Do people not love music enough to pay for it?
     Or do they just not like the purchasing options?

     I think Oink was vastly over-rated, and full of itself.

     Yep.

123. I find your response intriguing, as I was messaged by a number of OiNK users over some obscure indie band’s uploads. In most cases, they were friends/members of the band itself, often split up and defunct, and in one case the drummer didn’t even have a copy of his own album, and grabbed a lossless copy off of me..

     My music purchasing has multiplied 10-fold since I got into filesharing; it would be more, but I’ve got a wife and daughter and I have to use some measure of common sense. Therefore, when buying anywhere from 10 to 30 albums in a month, I download the other 70 that I listen to in a given month. I never buy from major labels, and purchase shirts and other items from the few bands I listen to and respect from those companies…the rest are indie musicians, stuff that’s not on Amazon or any record store within a 2-day drive.

     All that not to attempt to justify myself; I’m perfectly fine with the balance I’ve struck, hopefully other’s will find their own balance. But your comment about the passion and resilience of music-lovers hit me, and this is how I’ve worked out a survival plan. There is literally tons of fantastic music out there, but it’s in the nooks and crannies, and a place like OiNK shone a light in those dark places. The swill and pablum that passes for music in the general market is just that, and hopefully the good acts will evolve and stick around, while the bad die a miserable death in the quickly approaching crash.

     Hmmm…DJ Rupture… I might have to look up your stuff. 😉

124. I came across this on youtube and followed links here. After the dribble and abuse doled out there from the spotty faced half whits that frequent YT, its good to read some intelligent content on the subject.

125. Hey Jase,

     I tossed my own one and a half cents in on this and mentioned this essay over on my last.fm blog. I was a fan of yours long before I ever bumped into OiNK, but I did find my copy of Gold Teeth Thief somewhere randomly on the web, soon after you put it out for download. I know I’ve created at least two or three other fans by passing it along over the years. Which is tangential to this discusison, but at least a few of your fans do predate OiNK.

     It’s too bad this has turned into such a polarized discussion, because that seems to mean that everybody has to become a partisan, and it seems like everybody could learn something. It’s pretty clear that this is a situation where lots of people are right: what OiNK did was illegal and wrong, what it provided was invaluable, it was elitist, its users were super-polite and enthusiastic (for the most part), it was probably impairing record sales, it was definitely exposing a lot of people to music they otherwise wouldn’t have heard. I just hope everybody learns something more interesting than “sharing is bad” or “the RIAA are a bunch of worthless cocksuckers” from this whole experience.

126. This article is amazing. I’m glad that an artist has given the file sharing process a fair shake. I think that a lot of artists, while pissed about losing the money from the system, have to be somewhat happy about the fact that they are reaching a larger audience with their actual music. I don’t think that there will ever be a clear answer to this problem, especially since there will always be illegal music sharing because of sharing burned cd’s and mix tapes.

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128. Great work, JC.

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130. Hi. My name is Iain Mackenzie. I’m the technology reporter for Newsbeat programme at Radio 1.

     We’re looking to do a piece following-up on the closure of Oink.

     I wanted to include the views of pro-file sharers, talking about the value of these services and why they provide something that commercial services don’t.

     I’m looking to speak to / interview someone in the UK. (we don;t have to use your real name).

     If you’re interested in getting involved, drop me a line on iain.mackenzie@bbc.co.uk

     Cheers

     Iain

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134. I Believe that the root cause of this is the fact that companies are trying to stop losing money and they will do everything they can to avoid piracy, but the worst part here is that they show themselves as the victim of the piracy, I cannot deny that they’re affected by this, but we cannot deny either that records are too expensive and considering that a new release comes with too many “special features” or “special editions” it’s overwhelming how much you have to spend on getting your favorite artist record, anyway, I can say that the main purpose of sharing files there were not for benefits, it was because you wanted to get quality music and also I would like to add that in those kind of places the members are told to keep a ratio, so you couldn’t download without any sense. Either way, lets wait to see if there is a page that could have the oink’s quality… I’m also wondering how could they get into oink, because invites were not so easy to get, actually it could take a long time to get one of those… if you don’t believe me you could search “oink invites” on google to see what I’m saying.
     Regards.

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137. I feel like I’ve lost a musical limb, I have no idea what I’ll do without Oink!!

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139. Just one thing: THEY complain about pre-releases being pirated…
     Why dont THEY make an attempt to make sure that NO pre releases CAN be leaked?

140. Nice.

     The powers that be are flailing currently as they come to terms with the death of the business model which has pushed music, then video, as an easily packaged commodity.

     Go to any (ahem) British high street and walk into a Woolworths and take a look at the racks and racks of overpriced albums and dvds. Far from the old idea that an LP should be a desirable item, they are plasticy, undesirable, and now Superseded by digital formats.

     (Most ‘commercial’ top 40 albs’ available for free by typing “rapidshare ” on Google in most instances).

     As the process toward more bandwidth and faster connection speeds accelerates, lossless formats will become the norm (it is happening now). At this point the bubble has burst, and the companies have lost control.

     They have lost control of DISTRIBUTION but also of the PARADIGM.

     (I think it is the combination of both the RIAA wish to re-establish).

     Indie bands who have always lived from playing gigs, selling t-shirts and the occasional lucky commercial use of a track will carry on the same. (may be strengthen by new viral marketing ops).

     What have been completely torpedoed by file sharing are commercial singles, things which are already becoming a thing of the past. (In the last year HMV now only stock the top 10 singles in my town).

     (Although available for download from itunes, it would seem to me the only people doing this are ones who don’t know how to use the internet).

     As for film: In my provincial town, the local Odeon and Vue cinemas have the most dreadful selection of dross most weeks (the occasional matinee on a tuesday night.. But nothing EVER really interesting)

     Q_What reason would the film companies give for people with taste not to download films with a bit more depth or variety? (often representing their only chance of watching critically acclaimed films).

     A_None whatsoever.. Unless they stop patronising us and put someth worth watching on.

141. And I agree with the comment on PRE RELEASES whole heartedly.

     Here are some pointers for the recording industry:

     1) dont lend f’ing journalist whole copies of an album (give them low-res oggs or something if you must).

     2) lock the masters in a safe if you arent going to release it straight away.

     and

     3) er, thats it.

     (NB_ Also , lots of “leaks” of shit/weak albums (Groove Armada’s last album for example). No coincidence. Planted by the industry, they are just the “promo” of the naughties).

142. Great debate here,
     On a related issue….Clear Channel has done more to destroy music than 10 years of downloading….was the line that struck me in the below post about Bruce Springsteen and his lack of radio play in the US despite having a number one album

     http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/66595/#more

     Highlights the issue brought up here and the need for musical dispersal units that serve in the manner that we the listener, buyer, lover, the interested, desire.

143. Hopefully the next new site that gets in Oinks league will keep their anal-retentive nature. Organization is the key element to a torrent site. The reason people followed the rules was because every feared being kicked off and no one wanted to risk it

144. It’s some weeks since OiNK went down, and I do miss it, having been a member since near the start. I agree with the article wholeheartedly. I’d like to publicly thank “Oink” (especially) and all the admins and others who started it and kept it running over the years. It was by far the best example of a bit torrent sight that I’ve ever seen. Keep the faith.

     BuffaloBoy (the site’s ‘Oldest Fart’)

145. It’s some weeks since OiNK went down, and I do miss it, having been a member since near the start. I agree with the article wholeheartedly. I’d like to publicly thank “Oink” (especially) and all the admins and others who started it and kept it running over the years. I particularly wish “OiNK” the very best in his future endeavors.

     OiNK was by far the best example of a bit torrent sight that I’ve ever seen. Keep the faith.

     BuffaloBoy (the site’s ‘Oldest Fart’)

146. Speaking of “Pandora’s Box”….

     THIS music site makes me extraordinarily happy (though not quite so happy as OiNK made me):

     pandora.com

     😀

147. Why do you feel the need to bring other networks down with Oink? Please quit pointing fingers.

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150. I guess many people never realize how their downloading affect the musicians. Many defend themselves by saying “Hey, the record companies are making millions, they can afford a loss”. But in the long-run it’s the musiscian that dont get payed. (at least most of the non-commercial ones)

151. Speaking of “Pandora’s Box”….

     THIS music site makes me extraordinarily happy (though not quite so happy as OiNK made me):

     pandora.com

     😀

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153. Oink is actually what introduced me to your music. I’ve since purchased Special Gunpowder and if you’re ever doing it up in the Philadelphia area I’m there. Chalk one up for the pig.

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157. Pingback: The cultural heritage of the music video · phiffer.org

158. I’m a member of what.cd (much like OiNK, in case you’re unaware). the other day i stumbled across your work, and downloaded a few albums. i just finished Special Gunpowder, and i’m now listening to Gold Teeth Thief. so far i’m nothing short of amazed by what i’ve heard. if the rest of your work is as good as what i’ve already heard, you can be sure i’ll be grabbing a CD or 2.
     2 days ago i had never heard of you, DJ /rupture, and now i’m already in love and willing to throw money at you. what a terrible thing piracy is, eh?
     loved the article 🙂

159. The post is a good one. Anyone’s audience is a group of individuals. Nothing can change it.
     Nice article written here. I got to know a few more things about the topic

160. Pingback: Incubate Innovation » Blog Archive » Piracy: Oranges want to be free

161. just saw this article on your what.cd artists page

     one sentiment i’d like to share is that i feel there’s so much honesty involved in piracy these days and it’s so transparent that i dont think people can go on like this much longer without making sure that people like you are well paid

     oh and that now the enemy is pitchfork! haha

162. hey Colin — nice one, I’m glad my What page links to this! oink –> what waffles & more…

163. Pingback: Piraterij: sinaasappels want to be free « Atze de Vrieze
164. Pingback: Die fehlerhafte Berichterstattung der Medien im Fall OiNK
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166. Great site you’ve got here.. It’s difficult to find high-quality writing like yours these days.
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