Trivia NYC/DSO Media

You should read DJ Rupture’s excellent piece on the demise earlier today of the file-sharing site Oink. It came as a shock to a lot of my friends. I remember when Napster went down a few years ago, and the ensuing large discussion about how the end was nigh, and that this was the beginning of a crackdown on music shared over the internet.

But of course, that hasn’t happened. The genie has long ago been released from the bottle, and sites like Oink (which, to fill you in, was a members-only music sharing site that, despite what the papers are saying, wasn’t really about pre-releases, specializing instead on the huge backlog of out-of-print and reissued material that the record companies couldn’t be bothered to take out of mothballs, and which insisted on only high-quality, complete and fully annotated versions of those recordings; knockoffs and bootlegs were not generally tolerated at all) aren’t even the thin end of the wedge anymore at this point. the Bittorrent protocol isn’t even the only game in town anymore, and this time next year, when the next file sharing system is all the rage in the musical gray market, we’ll look back on the Oink era the way we now look at the Napster era, and smile at how naive we were to think that this was the end model for getting music to listeners in the 21st century.

I, too, found my albums on Oink (not terribly well seeded, but they were there, with scanned artwork, the whole deal). Like Rupture, I was far more pleased than offended, but today’s events got me thinking again about what’s going to come next. Oink operated in the margins of what we know as the law, but those laws were written, not by lawmakers, but by the big record companies, who have only the interests of their stakeholders and board members at heart. It surely can’t be a secret that even the most successful musical acts are making a very small fraction of what the label makes from any record. If Radiohead, for example, is giving their latest album away over nothing but a tip jar in the street, that should tell you something, if you didn’t already know it. The system is broken, and closing a website down isn’t going to change a damned thing.

Art and commerce have never played terribly nice together, and everyone falls in a different place on that continuum. But the world is continuing to change, and it has long seemed to my mind that trying to push the genie back into the bottle is a pointless exercise. You may believe in what you think is “right” & “wrong,” but the future is here, and it doesn’t care what you think. Better you spend the energy you’d be wasting chastising “pirates” and “thieves” trying to figure out how to change your economic model to one that includes a world where file sharing is something everyone does. A place we now know as Planet Earth.

Update: Some facts & rumors about Oink and what’s happened in the last 24 hours.

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