DJ Rupture: “Oink Was An Online Paradise For Music Fans”
The following is an interesting article by a musician/music fan:
“More than anything else this year, music & software file-sharing site Oink changed the way I thought about the music industry & BitTorrent technology. I’d heard rumors of Oink for years but hadn’t seen the members-only site until early ‘07. Oink was anal, Oink was comprehensive. The site administrators were fierce about quality — only high-quality files from original CD/vinyl rips could be posted. Many releases were even posted as FLAC (lossless) files. Oink allowed only entire releases, with complete tracklist information (uploading an incomplete album or a poorly labeled MP3 could get you kicked off). No bootlegs or concert recordings or unfinished pre-release mixes were permitted.
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!
My library metaphor for Oink makes more sense than economic analogies: for digital music & data, there’s lots of demand but no scarcity at all, which either requires that we rebuild an economic model not based on supply & demand, or start embracing commons analogies. I like living from my music but I also like libraries, the ideas behind libraries…
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.
If sharing copywritten music without paying for it were legal, then Oink was the best music website in the world.
Like many BitTorrent sites, Oink enforced share ratios. In a nutshell, share ratios mean that each user must upload a certain amount of data in relation to what they download. This feature encourages sharing. For example, a minimum share ratio of 0.20 (was that Oink’s? can’t remember) means that if you download 5 albums, then you must upload around 1 album’s worth of music, data equaling one-fifth the amount you nabbed from Oink users. If you only take (selfish leech) and do not give, or if you share, but not enough, then you eventually get kicked off.
With BitTorrent, most folks downloading the same files also upload the bits they grab, so everybody gets fast DL speeds (compare with popular files hosted on one server — incredibly slow speeds, or even server crash). Thus, a popular album (or legal linux distribution) can be grabbed in minutes with a decent internet connection. (uTorrent is a good BitTorrent client for Windows)
Watching Oink work helped me to understand the structural intelligence of BitTorrent architecture. Oink, like BitTorrent itself, became stronger & faster the more people used it – scalability writ large. Folks wanted to share – to maintain high share ratios. New releases were highly valued. But users kept older releases available as well (you never know when someone will want your Norwegian proto-deathmetal collection, so you keep your bandwidth open). Whether you call it distributed tape-sharing (to use an 80s term) or distributed piracy (to use a 90s industry term), Oink’s use of BitTorrent & careful quality control did it elegantly.
Aside: If RADIOHEAD (the British rock band who achieved worldwide success via a long-term mutually-beneficial relationship with a major record label) were truly radical, they would have posted their new album as a BitTorrent file with a PayPal & bank account link for the fans who felt like paying. Not hosting it on some weird website with an awkward interface & requiring credit card info…
Aside: One thing I don;t understand is how Oink got taken down while Soulseek continues as it has for years… Slsk has always struck me as the least moral of the p2p systems. If you pay Soulseek $5 a month, you get ‘privileged download access’ to files stored on Slsk users hard drives. Soulseek earns money by controlling access to the files stored on its users’ drives, users who never see any of this money. And if they don’t like the fact that paying people get special access to their data, there’s nothing they can do about it. Correction: with Slsk you have lots of control over who can access your shared files.
Oink was not “extremely lucrative” as the BBC boldfacedly claims. If I remember correctly, a one-time donation of 5 pounds would do something-or-other, but it was a far cry from Soulseek’s monthly privilege fees. Nor, for the record, did Oink “lead to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the internet months ahead of the release.” – this is strangely ironic, since Oink would strip user privileges if they were caught circulating unfinished or unofficial album versions. This was a site run by audiophiles and music obsessives!
But Pandora’s Box has been opened. Remember when Napster croaked? Piracy file-sharing is so much easier now. The anal-retentive British site admins kept Oink organized. Bittorent architecture kept Oink efficient. Oink’s alleged 180,000 users won’t forget how useful it was. The next Oink will be sturdier & more multiple. The overall movement is towards more ways to share music & ideas with like-minded individuals on the internet.
The way I see it, this can only be a good thing for music fans. And what musician is not first a music fan?”
(+76 rating, 16 votes)
i had never even heard of this service and it’s already gone. Damnit.
it was quite something to behold, all the old shit that was being served. literally had almost everything, and if it didn’t, you could request what it didn’t have.
I fucking miss that place :(
I would like to put my two or three cents into the pot. I must say, I am alarmed at this notice of finding Oink has been shut down. Let me clarify some facts about Oink. I, being a long time member, supporter, and believer in the site no matter how anal retentive it was. So here, have a few facts from very recent history.
1) No bootlegs, radio recordings, partial albums, differing bitrate compilations (with the exception of VBR), assorted collections, audiophile rips under 192kbps, porn, movies, videos, games, trash, spamming, harrassment, or duplicate copies were allowed.
2) A full track list had to be published and accompany the torrent.
3) Sharing outside of Oink through Oink was strickly forbidden in all forms. A seperate torrent had to be created to share outside of Oink.
4) A donation through PayPal of any amount granted you a GOLD STAR. That was purly a way to give you recognition for your generousity in helping fund the upkeep of Oink Servers. In no way, form, fashion, or variation did Oink grant anyone superior privilage based upon a donation.
5) When I say Donation, I MEAN DONATION. There was no requirement.
6) Oink is the main resource I found to inspire my own music production process. I very limited income, but am a deep supporter of real musical art.
7) SLSK is a flood of teens and toons, queers and goons… Stability is not the essence… Shit Talking is the median avarage conversation.
8) A .50 share ratio gives you a frown icon on Oink. Everyone can see it.
9) You stand corrected on the share ratio. On oink, differing greatly from other communities, you had a 1 to 1 Ratio after 15 gigs sharing. In the end, you must, no matter who you are, you had to share 100% of what you took… Meaning, if you took 10 gigs of various unnamed data in one week, you must simaltaiously upload or get caught over leeching. In the end, in order to get a flat 1.00 Ratio, you had to share back all 10 gigs.
10) This forced people to share what they took. No one wanted to get bumped out permenantly, so you made sure to offer something old, offer something new, offer what you just took. In the end, you came back to square one. People that did things right, left a computer open all the time, and let all thier old torrents stay alive way after everyone else had left the seed. 9 times out of ten, someone would come looking for what you still had, months after you orginally got it.
11) I love music the way I do, and have the appreaciation for it the way I do, because of Oink. I never sold what I downloaded, I never profited. I as thousands of us on torrents are, we are poor in comparision to those that shop at the mall. We have different taste, we have different likeing.
We ran to the artist website of a dj we loved that we found on oink, we investigated that artist, backed them, saved our hard earned dollars or pounds, euros or yen, to see that artist in concert… we belonged to places like DnB Arena, Drum and Bass Forum UK, We listen to BassDrive.com, we listen to the finest, we listen to classical music, the best fidelity recordings could be found on Oink. LOSSLESS…. Classical with no static, no AM, No commercials, not pomp, no dressup, no bullshit, just wonderful music…
And here is the kicker… we worked hard to keep oink working.
WE shared OUR MUSIC WITH EACH OTHER.
I am a small time artist, but I shared my tunes on oink back even before I was as good as I am now. And people took the albums (crap as I know it was at the time) and listenend, and gave feedback… Infact, I met artists on there, famous people, and worked with them here and there, sharing files of our own little fragments seperately via IMs.
I met DJs, Producers, Lighting Effects Specialists, sound Engineers, Artists, Entellectuals…
Government and Big Bizz does not want either of the last two. Artists lead to awareness, Awareness leads to Entellectuals, and Entellectuals lead to Reason, and the ability to reason leads to UPRISE.
Governments long ago found out that governing the people was a cash cow. And if you granted privy rights to cows, you made milk, and milk made cheese, and chees goes great with wine… and crackers too… I dont know if you understand where this little idiology is going, so let me be direct.
Farming people make very little, and are easily lead to believe based on the lack of education they naturally have. This is nothing against them. They can be some of the most loving folks in the world. but they are fundementalists at heart. Down Home, and for the workin class.
Big Bizz is the Cow that has a neon sign saying ” You Need 20 Glasses of Milk a Day to Stay Healthy”
The Farmer, the simpleton, the book logic educated, the policeman, the back bone of a poorly fed and ill informed, scared and gullable sociaty believes in the Ad… Why? Because someone “more successful than them (big biz) has said so!!!
Police like power (differnet story, sorry I digress)
If the gov grants tax breaks, incentives, and open legislative rights to Big Biz, while accepting campaign finacining, party gifts, stock ownership, offshore fund infusions, and branding publicity perks from Big Biz, than what you have is The Cow Paying the Gov to force milk down the throat of every man woman and child. And as long as the gov gets wine (luxury) and some cheese (kick backs) and some crackers (a whole lot of power over the ill educated) then so much the better for everyone!!!
Now, lets take music… Artist dont make money of of record sales, they make money off of the endorcements. That is where they make MONEY!!!! Record Companies are the ones that make money off of the peice of shit you stick in your CD WalkMan and scratch two minutes later while you are jogging.
OOOPPP I have to go run by the music store and buy another freekin 20 bone cd. I think I will do that now sence I am out and about, hopefully by the time I get home, I will have droped the new one in the mud and it will be shot too!!
I could go on and on… I will stop here… I hate the music industry, I hate the recording labels. I cant stand governments that allow private interests to dictate there laws and the usage and diversion of thier crime fighting forces to *piracy operation*
If you want to get some laws that are just, how about going over to china, and setting down the LAW as to how you will and wont allow animals to be treated. How about you start sueing these massive mining companies that are poisening the villages aroung them and profiting in the Millions, even tens of millions, or in the case of oil, hundreds of billions, how about you start forcing them to conform to ethical standards…
How about you form armies with all these gangbuster police that are whipped up to a tizzy and send them down to Mexico and have them storm the Mexican government and force them to open the goverment coffers and spill the wealth back out to the people. On the San Diego side of the USA / MEXICO border it is green covered… yes, its desert, but it is green!!!! the air is clean, the sky is cleaner!!!
There is a literal line at the border crossing…. stark, dry, brownish grey, dusty, stank!!! Poor peddling whatnot at the border… children walking the lanes of the freeway juggling to earn a few cents or pesos,permanant OPEN SEWERS flood over main roads ( yes you can even see the floaters) houses with only three walls, a blanket covers the forth wall…shack built on shack built on shack never finishing just trying to keep the wind out. Federalies roam in massive posses like bandetos… armed with semi-automatic weapons and swat gear… riding on the backs of police pickup trucks like arogant villians of the railroad era where robbery was a team sport and law was a gang.
Lets fight hunger, lets fight global warming.
We dont see anyone doing police raids on the gasoline or automobile industry when they shut people up who threaten to change the market with new fuels and inventions. You dont see the police or governement mandating open education where you learn what interests you… ( that could possibly mean not learning out of a book pre processed with fiction and infused with mind dulling mediocraties.)
You dont see the government sueing themselves over New Orleans, You dont see Federal Marsharls and Police getting sued and indited over inhumane practices over the way we treated the victims of new orleans. You dont see Our top officials getting removed from office over a war no one really wants accross the world.
You dont see the EPA getting sued for chemtrails…
You dont see the poor of america sueing the government for a war we dont want, deseasis we dont want, and taxes we dont need, while giving us ever increasingly limited health care options, no dental (exept removeal and dentures) no naturapathic alternatives, no reasonanable income to live on.
But we spend billions a year on a war.
You dont see the british gov sueing themselves for invaiding the avarage brits privacy every single day. You dont see the german gov sueing themselves for taxing the german public for simple luxuries such as a new tele or stereo… every single year.
You dont see us sueing ourselves for not walking in like Big Ever Reliable Brother America the Beautiful and saving Rowanda, or cuba, or Tibet!!! or anything that does not MAKE MONEY!!!!
Peace.
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