Oink

I was a member, and I'm very bummed that it's gone. I loved Oink. I loved the ability to read about some new music, or hear about it from a friend, and hop over there to give it a listen.

I was sort of surprised that Idolator ripped on Oink as harshly as they did -- obviously Maura didn't enjoy it but, given the poll results, lots of other people did. She wrote that "the site's catalog was only 'everything you'd ever want' if you were a twentysomething white dude whose music taste began at 'indie' and ended at 'rock,'" which is extremely wrong. I'd say over the year I was a member there were maybe 4 or 5 things I looked for that I couldn't find, and in almost every case someone uploaded it within a week of my making a request. Now, I wasn't looking for the weirdest, most out-there stuff imaginable, but my tastes run pretty far afield from the indie-rock that they suggested was their only stock in trade.

She also said that the only bad thing about not being a member was that now she would "have to wait an hour or two before finding out that the new Bjork record had leaked." Not all of us are quite as plugged in to the advance-copy scene as Idolator's editors; without Oink, I'm sure I'll still find out that some specific album has leaked (probably by reading about it here), but I won't have any way of actually getting my hands on a copy until it's available legitimately.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of the people crying about how the demise of Oink is the WORST THING EVAR. Everyone there was stealing music. People can justify it any way they want -- I certainly have -- and while some might argue that the rise of sites like Oink are not the cause, but rather a symptom, of the problems with the music industry, the bottom line is that we were getting access to music without paying for it. (By the way, in his well-written defense of Oink, DJ Rupture talks about a "library metaphor," which really gets me thinking. If libraries didn't exist, would it be possible to start them now, or would publishing houses prevent them?)

Anyway, back to Oink. I am super-bummed -- thanks to the site, I was able to listen to way more music, especially new music, than I'd been able to listen to in years. It's like I was back in college, amassing new and interesting stuff on a daily basis, and since it was all in one place I didn't have to spend time bugging my brother and my in-the-know friends for copies of cool stuff. Now I guess I'll just go back to being the out-of-touch 37-year-old I was pre-Oink, and hope that the local AAA station occasionally plays something new & cool so I can go DL it at iTunes.