OiNK Is Dead...And I Couldn't Care Less

Once again, school has gotten in the way of keeping this thing updated as much as I would like, and for that I will voluntarily catch a huge late pass on finally writing about the demise of the invite-only BitTorrent music site known as OiNK.

I got an OiNK invite around July, and it was, at the time, one of the happiest musical days of my life. I remember referring to OiNK as the "Music Downloading Valhalla," and other such nonsense. I worked my way up to the original 10GB pre-ratio download limit relatively fast. Once I slowed down the downloading to preserve my ratio, though, I started to miss OiNK less and less, and started relying on other websites for my lawbreaking needs (Albumbase, Sordo, Deek, ANR blog, etc...).

I think part of my beef with OiNK was the fact that it was geared so heavily towards such a geeky audiophile crowd. Yes, 128kbps obviously sounds worse than 320, or V0, or whatever...but is it really such an awful thing to allow? I've never been one to complain about bitrates. Mp3s are such a lossy format as it, why complain if you shit is only slightly less lossy than something else?

And all those FLAC nerds...don't even get me started. There is no way all those people have the stereo equipment necessary to really tell the difference...and I'm wondering just how big their hard drives are in order to store such a massive file format.

Really, it was just the general holier-than-thou attitude that purveyed the entire operation that got on my nerves. Some people would say that this just guarantees that there aren't things like "shitty rips" or whatever clogging up the servers, but I would argue that it just prevents people (like myself, on occasion) from sharing something they know will be enjoyed because of a fear of missing one of the requisite hoops that needed to be jumped through. It took me a while to start posting my owns rips on OiNK, mostly because of the absolutely insanely complex "How To Rip" tutorial that was presented on the site - which involved downloading a third-party ripper, encoding with LAME, and other such nonsense. In the end, I finally just said "Fuck this" and ripped around 10 CDs with iTunes and posted them...with no complaints.

Yes, the content was great. But did I find everything I was looking for? Fuck no. The only thing I ever used OiNK for was mainstream leaks, and relatively obscure (in the mainstream sense) hardcore or late 90s screamo. Was it nice to find the Chairshot Politics EP on there? Yes. But where was Powerbomb Anthems? I'll enjoy the Neil Perry and Jerome's dream discographies and all the other things that I obtained, but it just really wasn't all that much better than, say, Albumbase in my opinion.

The fallout in the internet community from this bust has been insane. So many of these people are truly, deeply convinced that they are doing absolutely nothing wrong that it just blows my mind. Let's face it: OiNK was an illegal site, taking users donations to help upkeep servers on which they exchanged copyrighted material, illegally. To continue using the site, you had to keep your share ratio up - in other words, enable others to steal as well. It's an incredibly brazenly illegal thing to do. I download music...a lot of music. If something is especially good, I go out and buy it once I can afford it (recent purchases: Stierkampf - (He's A) Grunge Whore + 4 and Gogogo Airheart - Real Live Kill...Ripe From the Vine). I realize what I'm doing is illegal, I just don't really care.

What is truly amazing to me about this whole thing is how committed some of these former OiNK users are to the idea that the recording industry/the concept of copyright/the concept of intellectual property is just completely totally fucked up and wrong. Guess what people? You are not changing the recording industry. No matter how morally or philosophically right what you think you're doing is...it isn't. It's stealing, and I don't feel any damn sympathy for myself or anyone else who has been locked out of downloading that new Deerhoof record because OiNK is down.

Go buy some music. It's what I'm doing this weekend.