The lost joy of music piracy: Rob Sheridan on Oink and What.CD

Rob Sheridan, the graphic designer and former creative director of Nine Inch Nails, is one of the few people in the music industry willing to defend media piracy out loud. In a long interview with Pigeons & Planes, he traces his path from a high-school HTML hobbyist to a self-described pirate who ended up working inside the business he was downloading from.

The 18 dollar album problem

His first download, he recalls, was a radio rip of Nine Inch Nails' 1997 single The Perfect Drug, compressed in RealAudio, the first format that made songs manageable to download. At New York's Pratt Institute a year later he found dorm servers full of public mp3 folders. Every album was an 18 dollar investment, he says, and file sharing let him try music he could never have afforded. In 1999 the band hired him to design their website; he left school, moved to New Orleans and eventually became art director.

The leak the label blamed on fans

When With Teeth arrived in 2005 it had already been circulating on the private tracker Oink for weeks. Sheridan says the band treated the leak as an industry failure rather than a fan betrayal: they knew it would leak the moment the label received it. Their answer was to release the digital version first through their own site and send the CD to the label afterwards. In 2007 they hid USB drives with new singles in venue bathrooms to launch the Year Zero alternate-reality game, and in 2008 they gave away The Slip free via BitTorrent.

What.CD and the private-tracker economy

Oink's servers were raided in October 2007; Sheridan's eulogy called it the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. What.CD rose in its place and by around 2011 had become the largest archive of music in human history. A former moderator speaking under the pseudonym Brian explains why such sites stayed closed: open trackers are as easy for police to join as anyone else, and only a ratio-tracked community gives members a reason to keep seeding.

Requests were the site's engine: a member could post a bounty of upload credit for a missing release, and most were filled for about $20 spent on Amazon or iTunes. The largest asked for The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls, an unpublished Salinger story readable only by appointment in a locked room at Princeton. It was treated as a running joke until November 2013, when a user tracked down one of the 25 copies allegedly printed in 1999 and leaked it. The torrent was pulled soon after.

What streaming actually solved

What.CD shut down in November 2016 after French authorities seized several of its servers; all site and user data was destroyed, leaving its 165,000+ registered users with a farewell message. Streaming filled the gap, and for $10 a month the world's music became instantly available. Sheridan's verdict is that the industry won the war without fixing the economics: streaming is not sustainable for artists, and some with millions of monthly streams still cannot pay their bills while middlemen keep the money.