How Music Got Free (21 page)

At the federal level Special Agent Peter Vu was struggling too. After three years he’d made little progress on Operation Fastlink and the RNS case. It’s possible he might have missed a critical lead. In 2005, after a meeting with the RIAA, someone at the FBI had filed an internal memorandum that referenced the Kings Mountain plant as a potential source of leaks. But after the divestiture of Universal’s CD manufacturing assets, the agents had not followed up on this report.

Instead, they tried a more unorthodox approach. RNS’ leader, whom Vu now knew as “Kali,” seemed to communicate only with Scene members who had established a long track record of insider access and leaks. So
what if the FBI created such a track record? What if, with the cooperation of the record industry, the FBI started leaking albums themselves? If Lil Wayne could do it, why not the Feds? It was the sort of undercover tactic that agents had used in the past to infiltrate narcotics trafficking groups and the Mob. But the idea went nowhere—the music industry had made it clear that under no circumstances would it ever permit the FBI to leak a prerelease album.

That left just one lead: the remaining pirates from APC. Once again, Prabhu and Vu canvassed those who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2004. They continued to shake the APC tree for quite some time, until finally in early 2006 someone finally cracked. His name was Jonathan Reyes, of College Station, Texas, and he was known online as “JDawg.” Reyes had established contact with a member of Rabid Neurosis, and, through a shared FTP server, thought he might be able to provide the suspect’s IP address. The FBI pursued this lead, and, finally, in late 2006, Vu reported to his superiors with the good news: he’d finally wiretapped the Internet connection of a member of
RNS.

O
ink 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.

For the end user, though, the donations were a small part of the story. Most were concerned with maintaining their upload/download ratios, and they were running out of material to source. That left one option: a blazingly fast Internet connection. The dormroom downloaders got this on their parents’ dime, but for everyone else it cost real money. This meant either paying for more home bandwidth or
renting a “seedbox” server from a hosting company at twenty bucks a month, which thousands of Oinkers did.

Why were people paying to use Oink? The torrent technology wasn’t easy to master, a good ratio was difficult to maintain, the forum moderators were Nazis, and uploading even a single byte of data to the site technically constituted a felony-level conspiracy. A lot of the stuff on Oink was also available from the Pirate Bay and Kazaa, and, past a certain point, it would be easier just to pay for iTunes, right? Theories abounded. The classical economist saw the benefits of unlimited consumer choice outweighing the cost of ratio maintenance and the risk of getting caught. The behavioral economist saw a user base accustomed to consuming music for free and now habitually disinclined to pay for it. The political theorist saw a base of active dissidents fighting against the “
second enclosure of the commons,” attempting to preserve the Internet from corporate control. The sociologist saw group-joiners, people for whom the exclusivity of Oink was precisely its appeal.

The best answers to the question, though, were culled from the site itself. Oink’s heavily trafficked user forums revealed a community that resembled Ellis himself: technically literate middle-class twentysomethings, mostly male, enrolled in university or employed in entry-level jobs. A significant number of members weren’t even that lucky, but were instead what the British government called “NEETs”: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Concerts were a popular topic of discussion; so were drugs. One of the busiest threads on the site simply asked “Why Do You Pirate Music?” Thousands of different answers came in. Oinkers talked of cost, contempt for major labels, the birth of a new kind of community, courageous political activism, and sometimes simply greed. Another thread—a better one, really—asked users to post pictures of themselves. If the webcam selfies revealed anything about the average music pirate, it was an unusual fondness for septum piercings. But the biggest draw of all was the
mere
existence
of such forums. They were a place to learn about emerging technology, about new bands, about underground shows, and even about the way the music business really functioned. iTunes was just a store, basically a mall—Oink was a community.

Ellis consciously cultivated this ethos. Most private trackers failed. The site operators were standoffish and uncommunicative, and as a result the members didn’t upload enough material. Ellis, by contrast, mandated civility of discourse, even as he urged his members to develop ever greater levels of both musical snobbery and technical skill. He seemed at times to promote an almost utopian vision, except his utopia actually worked. The result was illegal, of course, but it was also something of great value, produced cooperatively, and built in naked opposition to the expectations of in-kind reward that supposedly governed human behavior in the capitalist age.

Ellis’ life during this period took on simple, almost monastic dimensions. He lived in a shared apartment in a shit town in the middle of nowhere, commuted in the morning to a hump job no one cared about, then returned each day as the venerable abbot of the online world. On file-sharing forums across the Internet, Oink invites became a scarce commodity, and were sometimes even traded for money. (Ellis discouraged this.) On those forums too, the anonymous pirate captain Oink was feted and praised.

A less friendly sort of attention came from rights-holders. By 2007, the site’s inbox was overflowing with takedown emails, and the pretense of polite dialogue had been dropped in favor of threatening legalese. M.I.A., the Go! Team, and Prince all succeeded in having their record catalogs pulled from the site. Other, less familiar players did too. “
The TUBE BAR prank calls are not public domain and are copyrighted by Bum Bar Bastards LLC and exclusively distributed by T.A. Productions,” read a memorable notice. “We demand that you cease its unauthorised distribution of our copyrighted content.”

Ellis began to worry about his exposure. Oink had gotten too big, too quickly. There were too many users and too little new material for
them to source. The most common complaint from the newly invited was that “
there was nothing left to upload.” The best way to maintain your ratio on Oink was to find something totally new, and as the site expanded, the best way to do
that
was to infiltrate the recording industry’s supply chain any way you could. Leaked material started to appear on Oink, sometimes weeks early. Often these were Glover’s own leaks, but sometimes Oink’s user base, driven by the relentless economy of download ratios, started scooping even RNS.

Ellis was not a member of the Scene, and he was not interested in infiltrating the record companies’ supply chains. He was an archivist, not a leaker, and he knew that the prerelease game brought attention he didn’t need. Seeking to mitigate the problem, he began to consider opening other media verticals that would allow his new users to meaningfully contribute without leaking. Television and movies were out, as other private trackers were already operating in those spaces, and there was an unwritten consensus between site operators not to tread on one another’s turf. He decided, finally, that he would permit the uploading of audiobooks.

For a site that had already pirated the vast majority of recorded music in history, it sounded like an inconsequential decision, but Ellis had just tampered with one of the primal forces of nature. J. K. Rowling was by this time well on her way to becoming the wealthiest author in the history of ink. Her seven-book Harry Potter saga had broken all known sales records and been translated into 67 languages, including West Frisian and ancient Greek. An eight-picture movie deal with Warner Brothers had turned young stars Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe into household names. The literary franchise comprised the bestselling narrative in the history of publishing and the movie franchise held the highest worldwide box office receipts in the history of cinema. The audiobook version shared in this popularity. Narrated by the beloved British comedian Stephen Fry, it, too, was the bestselling audiobook in the history of the medium.

Rowling’s personal story was heartwarming. She was a divorced
single mother who’d written the bulk of her first book while collecting public assistance. The first edition of
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
had been commissioned for a modest print run of 1,000 copies—those editions were now worth tens of thousands of dollars. The popular narrative, however, tended to focus more on the “rags” section of her story than the “riches,” and this obscured her fearsome business sense. Globalization had made intellectual property assets more valuable than ever before, and Rowling had a knack for maximizing the franchise power at her command. She was the new Walt Disney, implanting a beloved set of characters into the public imagination and then transforming them into immortal, cash-spewing business assets. By the end of the decade she would be publishing’s first billionaire. And, as always, the value of her intellectual property relied critically on the vigorous suppression of bootleggers.