Technique and many others have recognised that file sharing can be a huge blessing to those artists whos art is not respected in the mainstream. ART being the key word, if what you have made is art then you want everyone to hear it, if what you have made is just another formulaic product (metallica for example) then you obviously want every penny for that product. These people have no love for the music, if mcdonalds paid enough then i’m sure Lars Ulrich would be happy to push burgers instead!!

I’ve just used one man as an example, but many great artists world wide are having their music heard by new audiences due to sites such as oink. How can any music enthusiast say this is a bad thing?

The loss of oink is a dissapointment, but in reality someone somewhere is setting up a new and improved site that will learn from any mistakes oink made, and this evolution of ideas will continue to thrive regardless of the money hungry devils that frequent the music industry and ruin its integraty.

fairwell oink, you will be sourly missed!!

“One love
One music
One people
One movement
One heart
One spark”

It’s so typical to see profit as the only motivator in a captialist society, which is why sharing can be so satisfying. As you point out in this case, the irony is supreme: the worst Carpenters schlocky bank commercial song is transformed into a brilliant statement by an underrated genius, only to have it thrown in the dustbin by the label that probably encouraged him to record the crap song in the first place.

Back to the song for a minute- notice that the whole band comes alive during the outro. Suddenly the bass starts hitting harder and dropping into more of a groove, even distorting a bit, the drummer drops in some more accents, and the vibes create a shimmering backdrop. I am guessing they jammed for 20 minutes!

That segment of that song is in some ways a pinnacle of expressive achievement to me, and I feel that GG took the meaning of a song that started life in a bank commercial, found notoriety thanks to the golden voice of a girl drummer forced by her brother to sing, and vaulted it up to a whole other level with what he chose to play over those changes. This may seem to those reading this as a triviality and much ado about nothing, but these little things often form the underpinnings of what gives us the most sustenance and comfort in these sometimes painful lives we live.

I feel that if the music industry doesn’t figure it out and adapt to the evolving paradigm of online music, many many unreissued albums (long-forgotten but tremendously worthy of reconsideration) will be lost to history forever. This robs future generations of the true cultural breadth and depth of what’s gone before, and makes us poorer and less enlightened in the long run, because like I said I believe that Art and especially the multidimensional, Vibrational language of Music is really all we have left. I hope Capital doesn’t burn that village in thinking they (the corporations) are somehow saving it.

Thanks henry, you made my 41st birthday, just knowing that someone hears what I do in that GG recording.

Everybody else – don’t worry about the moral high ground. We all know that record label and movie people are sleaze. A copy of something has little intrinsic value. Copyright is an abstract concept that has no basis in reality. Rewards for creativity are rare in this society.

Radiohead is selling their album direct download for whatever people want to pay. Last I heard they are making average $5 per download and they have over a million downloaded. These record sh*theads now have bigger things to worry about than some kids trading the latest pre-releases…

Of course the BBC will take the side of the anti piracy lobby; they stand to lose their cushy jobs…

Perhaps a news broadcaster should not be associated with a revenue generating media corporation?

I say the fight should be taken to the industry – with millions of people wanting easier access to music and television shows which in the most part are broadcast to the public anyway. Surely the tables can be turned if it is proven how corrupt, greedy and talent-stifling their industry really is?

One caveat, though – sharing of mainstream movies (especially prior to release) will never be acceptable, nor ‘right’. My humble word of advice to my favourite site RLSLOG is this: distance yourself from CAM/Screener/TS links completely. These are the BIG thorns in the movie industry’s butthole.

Sharing DVDRips should be as defensible as borrowing the disc from your friend.

Cut down one torrent site and 3 will take its place. Face it, you’ve lost this battle. Adapt or die

I was an OINKster, in the segment of it that dealt in all out-of-print stuff that the corporations won’t reissue… lotsa clean vinyl rips, long-gone jazz CDs issued only in Japan, weirdo stuff. The people, at least in this coterie of devotees, were super appreciative and community-oriented about the crazy stuff I would put up, and I got a lot of positive feedback that inspired me to keep doing it.

See, I’m one of those people that believes in Music as pretty much the last bastion of worthfulness on Earth, the last weapon of defense against the colonization of our minds by the quantity-destroys-quality attitude, and to me the world is just a better place if Grant Green’s “Visions” and Alice Coltrane’s “Lord of Lords” are available to those that want them. Certainly Blue Note and impulse!, once proud companies but currently being run into the ground by blithering idiots who don’t even know what went before and don’t seem to care, aren’t interested in supplying these products because they don’t see the equation in the light of cultural weight and legacy, only in terms of the phony $$ pursuits that have taken over the other 99.9% of activities on this fallen planet.

I think OINK is being eulogized to the extent it is because of this aspect, the idea that you could go on there and score a copy of “The Sun and the Moon Have Come Together” by the Fourth Way when there really isn’t any other way on Earth to get one. It seems from what I’ve read here and elsewhere that the camps are split, with the people who weren’t on OINK being dismissive and “who cares?” about it and the people who were actually involved feeling like something important has died.

Of course I am dead against the idea of pre-release material getting out on the web before artists have a chance to profit from their efforts, who wouldn’t be? But for me that’s not at all what OINK was about… I pretty much only ever d/l’d stuff from there that wasn’t really available any other way, and this I in no way regret.

Just my 2 cents.