Normally, eating less bacon leads to a healthier life. In the wake of the OiNK music torrent sharing site shutdown last week, though, less piggy in your system turns out to not be so good for you.
Much has been debated and written about the topic already. If you haven’t read Demonbaby’s excellent rant yet, I HIGHLY recommend you do so. It’s a bit long, but articulates the significance and background of OiNK very well. Many of my sentiments are echoed within that post.
Since I used to work for a legal music download service, I feel compelled to throw my two cents in on the topic of digital music distribution.
One of the biggest reasons why legitimate digital music services are not offering great solutions for music fans is that the people selling the music simply do not get it. There is a disconnect between everyone involved. The record labels don’t understand why offering a DRM-infused song file is anathema to what the customer wants. The digital retailers don’t understand what the consumer wants exactly. They proclaim to want DRM-less files because that means their potential market is bigger. Then they can sell their wares to people with iPods, Zunes, Walkmans, or any music player. What they don’t understand is that a 128kbps AAC or WMA file is nowhere near “CD quality”. They assume that since the average person can’t tell the difference between bitrates, there’s no point in wasting bandwidth and storage space for higher quality song files.
Which is simply insulting.
When has a company become successful by selling an inferior product to the lowest common denominator when its competition offers cheaper and higher quality products? Amazingly, that is exactly what the current digital music retailers are trying to pull off. To further illustrate the ignorance of digital music retailers, one particular service refused to support any web browser that was not Internet Explorer on a PC. That’s right – no Firefox, no Mac support. Utterly ridiculous, right? How can a retailer hope to be even remotely successful when they are cutting out at LEAST 35% of their potential customer market?
As an audiophile weened on “scene” releases, it was a shock going into my new job and seeing the inferior wares that I would have to peddle. Throughout my tenure, I championed for better quality sound files. Unfortunately, my words fell upon deaf ears. It was extremely frustrating to see a way to capitalize on a need in the market, but to not be able to do anything with it. Like the major record labels churning out ephemeral one hit wonders one after another to satisfy the shareholders, the major digital music retailers went with the “safe” route in offering a mediocre music product in order to appease the accountants.
At the end of the day, the largest share of the blame is placed squarely on the major labels for selfishly stunting the growth of legitimate music services. Everyone knows and has an opinion the majors’ insistence on selling DRM’d tracks. The other issue that receives less attention is the licensing of tracks for sale on the services. Just having a deal with a major record label is not enough. From then it’s a tit for tat game for each digital music retailer to obtain “exclusives” within the majors’ catalogs. For example, iTunes may maneuver to have an exclusive on all of Madonna’s songs. This would mean Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo!, and other music services won’t have her music for sale at all. There are also different legal clearances for selling a track a la carte for $.99 and for “subscription” services (such as Rhapsody). Rhapsody may be able to sell you a Rihanna track for $.99 but you can’t listen to it through your $14.95 monthly subscription because her label wants you to buy the track. The headache increases when certain artists themselves (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin to name a couple) are opposed to selling their tracks digitally ANYWHERE.
Why not simply just cut off all major label content then? The unfortunate reality is that major label content is pretty much the only source of steady income for these services. Partly because indie content does not sell enough volume by definition and partly because consumers of that type of content tend to be knowledgeable enough to either pirate their music or want a higher quality, non-DRM format. (CDs and eMusic comes to mind) These digital music stores have to keep pandering to the majors simply because their content is the only thing keeping them in business. Ironically, not having major label content is exactly what is keeping indie-focused, non DRM’d digital music retailers such as eMusic from breaking out and capturing the market.
Being immersed in such bullshit day in day out takes its toll on someone. Eventually you start to believe that nothing can be done about the state of digital music sales so you continue to chase your own tail.
But one day i got an invite to OiNK. And I was liberated from the Matrix.
Free from any of the licensing bullshit that plagued legal services, one could find virtually any music they wanted. It didn’t matter if you were looking for Sgt. Pepper, Bollywood hits, or the latest Pitchfork recommendation – everything was there.
And the quality of the tracks! Not only did they have scene-quality releases (which were almost bare minimum quality), they had even BETTER quality user rips from EAC encoded in everything from v0 LAME to lossless FLAC. While you had to work at maintaining a good enough ratio, it was nowhere near the time you would have to spend as a courier to be at the top of the scene food chain. Demonbaby’s post likened it to a “mini-economy” and it’s completely true. People would work to increase their ratio because it meant they could get more music. It forced them to be involved with the system in a productive way and as a result, people actually cared about their contributions to the community. This, along with the minimum quality rules, ensured that the site would not be flooded with shitty rips and poorly tagged music files. The experience is the complete opposite to venturing out into the eDonkeys and the KaZaa’s of the p2p world, where you would be lucky to get a working sound file period.
With over 180,000 former users of OiNK, I’d say that validates the assumption that people care about the quality of their music. It’s amazing that neither the record labels nor the digital retailers can see that. If only there was some way to harness OiNK’s infrastructure, I truly believe that this could be the basis of a real solution for the digital music distribution problem. As long as the record labels and certain digital retailer executives continue to not understand their market, though, such a solution will not come from the current players in the market. And if no solution comes around soon, you can bet people will just give up on the bullshit that is consuming new music and turn to other forms of entertainment such as TV, movies, and video games.
After all, cutting bacon out of your diet isn’t so bad when there’s lots of other good food out there to eat.
