This piggy’s gone to heaven

Last week police in Britain shut down the music torrent site OiNK. They also arrested the administrator of the site on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright. You can read the BBC news story here. Or watch this:

This has had a huge effect on music fans as OiNK was considered the most elite of torrent sites with a huge database of pretty much all types of music. The site got by for a while because of its invite-only policy for users. Users also had to keep up good ratios (number of uploads = number of downloads).

Of course the blogosphere has been all over this and their have even been ridiculous memorial sites.

I was never a member of OiNK but I know from people on message boards that the amount of music and the quality of music on there was astounding. Many users used it for rare or out-of-print albums.

I think the artist DJ/Rupture summed it up nicely in his blog:

“In many cases, I believe that downloading an album from Oink would be both faster (more on this in a bit) and give you more information about the CD than sites like iTunes.Think about that… a free website, which gives fast downloads of music at equivalent or higher quality than the paid music sites. And this free site has an incredibly deep collection of both new and old releases, usually in a variety of file formats and bit-rates. It’s overwhelming! First thought: wow, Oink is an amazing library. Second thought: wow, I really need to start selling DJ Rupture t-shirts, CD sales will only continue to drop & I gotta make money somehow!
…

For fans, consideration of the music comes before questions of money and ownership – this is how it should be. Any system that doesn’t take that into account as a central fact is going to generate a lot of friction. When I say ’system’, I mean everything from Sony to iTunes to white-label 12″s that cost 8-pounds ($16.38!) in London shops and only have 2 songs on them. (I bought a bunch of these last week, and it hurt).

Oink didn’t offer solutions; it highlighted the problems of over-priced, over-controlled music elsewhere. Oink was an online paradise for music fans. The only people who could truly be mad at it were the ones directly profiting from the sale of digital or physical music. (Like myself! F%5k!)

…

Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…About a week after I shipped out orders of the first live CD-r Andy Moor & I did, it appeared on Oink. Someone who had purchased it directly from me turned around and posted it online, for free. I wasn’t mad, I was just more stunned by the reach… and usefulness of the site.”

In Rainbows

Today will hopefully go down as an important day in musical history.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about: Radiohead announced last week that their much anticipated seventh album was done and was going to be released directly through the album’s website. Fans were given the option to pre-order a discbox for 40 pounds or download the album digitally for however much they wanted to pay. That’s right you could pay however much you wanted including nothing at all.

Radiohead has been out of a recording contract since their last album and many weren’t expecting the album till late next year after the band signed to a label. Radiohead has completely sent their fans and the recording industry for a loop by completely surpassing a record label and releasing their music directly to their fans.

The album came out last night and activation codes for the download were sent out sometime around midnight. Music bloggers and fans stayed up all night and the reception has been nothing but positive, not just because of how good the actual album is but also because of how Radiohead went about this whole situation. People were actually paying more for the download than they would for a regular CD just because of how much they appreciate what Radiohead has done.

Radiohead has taken the control away from a record label and basically put the control in the hands of their fans. As far as I know, a band this large and popular has never attempted something like this. They essentially leaked the album themselves.

The blog You Ain’t No Picasso summed it up very nicely:

“By offering the album in the way they did, Radiohead gave us a bit of a gift: universal excitement. This effectively brought back the joy of album release day — millions of people hearing the record for the first time at once — and combined it with the our modern ability to instantly gush to all of those fellow fans online. It’s the best of all worlds.”