Song, by Toad

Well OiNK appears to be about to bite the dust. For those of you who don’t know, OiNK is a filesharing site where people share pre-release copies of albums for nothing. There is a minimum quality, so you know you’re getting a good product and you are ‘invited’ to donate to the site, but not compelled.

Ultimately, I am completely unsure what I think about this sort of site as, I get the impression, are most people who aren’t either avaricious music industry parasites on one hand or some sort of self-absorbed teenager with a ridiculously overinflated sense of entitlement on the other.

Basically, there are arguments for and against unrestricted filesharing, but I still find it difficult to get my head around the idea of sharing high-quality copies of an artist’s work without them receiving a penny for it. Don’t tell me that people make their money from touring nowadays because, whilst that may be true for Radiohead or other groups big enough to generate their own publicity, it is definitely not true for small bands. I can’t emphasise this enough: they have told me this themselves, and for now it just doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately though, free-flowing filesharing can be very helpful to artists in many ways. I am also acutely aware of one of the central issues of this debate: can it ultimately be stopped? So in terms of unlimited filesharing I get the impression that monetising rather than simply trying to extinguish these things is going to be the way forward for the music industry. I know this is hardly a startling conclusion of course, so I am not pretending to have made an insightful statement here. All I’m saying is that I am not in principle against that side of OiNK’s service, but the fact that they aren’t paying artists a penny, despite anyone’s free-flowing information protestations, bothers me.

Deep down, it is the actual content of the material swapped on OiNK that bothers me – pre-release copies, unfinished and leaked versions – all of it basically shows utter disrespect to the artist and the integrity of their art form. ‘Oh, fuck it Mr. Da Vinci, you’re nearly finished, just hand it over. It’s pretty obvious it’s just a picture of a woman sat there smirking anyway’.

This sort of service could be great if it could be done in a manner that respects both the artists’ intent and their financial entitlement. Yes, I said entitlement. They spend years of their lives making this shit and if we want it, they deserve money in return. That is the way the whole world works. Ultimately, OiNK was just piggy.

Ben Folds – All U Can Eat
The Beatles – Piggies

If you want to read the view of someone I really probably agree with about pretty much everything, but have somehow managed to come to an entirely different conclusion from, try this from The Rawking Refuses to Stop.

Sorry about the pun. Good though, wasn’t it! And thanks to Wendy for spotting both the picture and the excellent piggy noise.