Hundreds of thousands of music lovers used OiNK, but what prompted them to log on and swap music?

Nigel Burton talks to one user OiNK was a music lovers dream.

The site, also known as OiNK’s Pink Palace, operated for three years before it was shut down in a joint Anglo-Dutch police operation.

Music industry organisations described OiNK as an “online pirate music pre-release club”.

Users saw things very differently.

They say OiNK was providing a valuable service and accuse the agencies who closed it down of destroying an invaluable online music database populated with rare and out-of-print tracks.

A month before his arrest, Alan Ellis, the Teesside man who created OiNK, was named one of the 25 most influential people in online music by Blender, a respected music magazine.

OiNK itself hosted no illegal files. It was merely a way for members to discover audio tracks they wanted and download them from other computers.

Olivia (not her real name) joined OiNK because the cost of CDs in her home country Romania made music almost impossible to buy.

“Lack of choice was a big problem,”

she said. “Around 2004, there were very few stores dedicated to music and local distributors simply didn’t import anything that wasn’t running on MTV.

“Even so, the price of albums was high – an average person had a monthly wage of $250 and a music album was $20.

“You would need around $150 a month to pay electricity, water and everything related to living costs and another $70 for food. I have a brother and sister. We were a family of five, and you have to understand that even with two salaries, we couldn’t afford to spend much money on a CD – we could buy clothing for two children with that.

“Personally, I didn’t care about piracy at that time, because I knew artists wouldn’t really lose money – people couldn’t afford the CDs anyway.”

Some music fans turned to OiNK because the music they wanted was no longer available.

“A large percentage of members were looking for albums that they already had as tapes or LPs,”

said Olivia. “Some of these were out of print – there were some really unique albums uploaded, such as very limited CDs of a band. There were also albums copied from obsolete formats like Laserdisc or eight track tapes.”

Interestingly, OiNK was occasionally used by the music industry itself to promote a new CD or band. Trent Reznor, frontman for Nine Inch Nails and a powerful music producer, admitted he held a membership account and described OiNK as “the world’s greatest music store”.

“If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid,” he said.

Olivia added: “In some cases, bands would post individual tracks as promotional content on their websites. Members would take that and upload it (to OiNK) to promote their favourite bands.

“In some rarer cases, albums were actually leaked by the music labels themselves – I don’t think this number was small, probably one to three torrents (files) out of 100 were uploaded by labels for promotion.”

Now OiNK has closed fans are still swapping music but now they do in closed groups with carefully vetted memberships, making it harder for the music industry to infiltrate.

Reznor remains unrepentant for downloading fellow muscians’ work.

He said OiNK’s members were “not stealing because they’re going to make money off it; they’re stealing it because they love the band”.