CHAPTER 16
Oink grew explosively. By the beginning of 2006 the site had 100,000 users and hosted torrents for nearly a million distinct albums, making it four times bigger than the iTunes Store. The site’s user base was uploading 1,500 new torrents each day. Every album was available in multiple formats, and soon Oink had complete, thoroughly documented discographies for any musician you could care to name. Think of the most obscure release from the most obscure artist you knew; it was there, on Oink, in every issue and reissue, including redacted promo copies and split seven-inch records and bonus tracks from Japanese pressings you’d never even heard of.
Take the artist Nick Drake. Obscure in his lifetime, Drake sold only 5,000 copies of his final album Pink Moon before overdosing on pills in 1974 at the age of 26. Over the next 25 years his reputation grew slowly. He became a “musician’s musician,” beloved by connoisseurs but unknown to the public. Then, in 1999, the title track for Pink Moon was featured in a commercial for the Volkswagen Cabrio: young trendsetters on a nighttime joyride, scored with the chronically depressed singer’s lyrics about the meaninglessness of life. It ended with a pan to the sky, where the Volkswagen logo stood in for the moon.
The campaign was a bust from Volkswagen’s perspective. The Cabrio never sold well in the United States and was discontinued within three years. But the effect on Drake’s back catalog was dramatic—the advertisers had done a better job selling the music than the car. Within a few months of the commercial’s first airing, Pink Moon had sold more copies than it had in the previous quarter century. And since Drake had released his music on the UK’s Island label, his back catalog was now part of the behemoth they called Universal Music Group. The music executives there moved quickly to take advantage of this serendipitous gift.
You could learn all this on Oink, which acted almost as a museum exhibit of Drake’s critical afterlife, charting the repeated attempts to cash in on his growing critical and commercial stature. The website’s incomparable archives had Pink Moon ripped from eight different sources: the exceptionally rare, extremely valuable first-edition 1972 vinyl from Island Records; the 1986 box set CD reissue from Hannibal Records; the 1990 CD release from Island; the 1992 CD re-reissue from Hannibal; the post-Cabrio 2000 CD re-re-reissue from Island; the accompanying Simply Vinyl 180-gram audiophile re-re-reissue, also from 2000; the 2003 Island Records digitally remastered re-re-re-reissue on compact disc; and the Universal Music Japanese vinyl re-re-re-reissue from 2007. Each of the reissues was then encoded into an alphabet soup of file types—FLAC, AAC, and mp3—so that ultimately there were more than thirty options for downloading this one album alone.
You couldn’t find stuff like this on iTunes. The size and scope of Oink’s catalog outdid any online music purveyor, and given its distributed nature, the archive was essentially indestructible. But its growth made it difficult to maintain. Alan Ellis now spent almost all his free time keeping the site running, and as his grades suffered, he was forced to repeat a year at university. By the summer of 2006, Oink was getting 10,000 page views a day, and the hosting bills had grown to thousands of dollars a month. Several times, Ellis ran pledge drives on the site’s front page. The response from his community was overwhelming. In the span of a year Ellis’ army donated over 200,000 pounds—nearly half a million dollars. People liked Oink. They were even willing to pay for it.
A surplus began to mount. In regular posts to the site’s front page, Ellis was transparent about Oink’s finances and costs, but what he did next was unusual and, to his detractors, fairly suspicious. While he continued to insist publicly that the site was not a for-profit venture, over the next few months Ellis opened ten separate bank accounts in his own name, then transferred the surplus donations from the Oink PayPal account into these small personal accounts.
Ellis would later contend the transfers were an attempt to reduce risk. He felt he was in danger of having an account frozen or seized—something that PayPal had done before to other accounts linked with copyright infringement claims. The more accounts he had, he felt, the less he would lose if any one of them was frozen. And, to be sure, there was no evidence to show that Ellis ever spent any of the money from the bank accounts on himself. As he became a pirate kingpin, his personal life remained a model of frugal simplicity. He lived as a student, renting a shared apartment with his classmates, cooking meals for himself and his girlfriend on a modest budget, and traveled by city bus.
Whatever his motivations, Ellis’ fears about asset seizures were amply justified. In May 2006, Swedish authorities raided the server farm that hosted the Pirate Bay, seizing the computer that hosted the site and arresting its founders. The world’s premier public torrent site went dark, and for a moment it looked as if the torrent revolution had been dealt a fatal blow. But the site’s operators were cautious, and had anticipated the possibility of such a raid. They’d kept copies of the tracker’s database in a secret location, and within three days a backup server was sourced and the site was back online. The Pirate Bay raid made international headlines, and its founders were looking at jail time, but the resiliency of the site further stoked the public’s interest in torrent technology.
Oink benefited from this hubbub and continued to grow. A short time later the first takedown notices started to come in. Around the world, copyright holders had taken the idea of enforcement into their own hands, and had deputized law firms and private investigators to chase after intellectual property that was illegally hosted online. The IP enforcers were polite at first—they wrote simple, nonthreatening emails to Ellis, informing him he was in violation of copyright and asking him to disable the offending torrents. Unlike the Pirate Bay guys, who took a special kind of pride in telling Spielberg to cram it, Ellis was accommodating. While never admitting liability, he routinely disabled torrents in response to these requests, out of what he termed “goodwill.”
By the time Ellis finally graduated from university in 2007, Oink’s army was 180,000 members strong. Among the foot soldiers were several famous musicians, including Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who admitted in an interview to being an avid user of the site and described it as “the world’s greatest record store.” Ellis himself could attest to this. While administering the site, he’d gone from being a casual music listener to a total fanatic. He used the music-tracking site Last .fm to publicize his listening habits, and during the three years he’d been running Oink, he had listened to over 91,000 songs—6,000 hours’ worth of music.
He had grown in another way as well. In running Oink, Ellis developed an expertise in the Web-scripting and database administration skills his education had failed to provide. Upon graduation, it was this, far more than his degree, that made him employable. He was engaged by a chemical company in Middlesbrough as an IT administrator, a job that paid £35,000 a year. Upon entering the workforce, he began to keep a meticulous monthly budget on a spreadsheet on his computer. The spreadsheet did not cite the Oink donations as a source of income, which, by this point, were averaging $18,000 a month.