The lost joy of music piracy

The Lost Joy of Music Piracy

What.CD, Oink, and the banalities of streaming.

July 15, 2026
BY Eden DaSilva
Design by Tyler Farmer.

“I was responsible for the dancing baby meme,” Rob Sheridan laughs over a video call. Now better known as an accomplished graphic designer and the former creative director of Nine Inch Nails, Sheridan’s list of accolades date back to 1997, when he created a website dedicated to the low-resolution animated GIF.

The first thing I notice when our interview begins is his t-shirt, which bears the ironic slogan “HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC,” a phrase once printed on record sleeves in the UK during the ‘80s alongside a cassette tape resembling a skull and crossbones, later used in the logo of the infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay.

During his decades-long career in the music industry, Sheridan has stood out as one of the few outspoken advocates of media piracy.

“I was really early on the internet, making websites just as a hobby in high school to teach myself HTML,” he explains. “I remember the first time I was able to download the leak of a new song, Nine Inch Nails’ 1997 single ‘The Perfect Drug.’ It was played on a radio station and someone recorded it, and was able to upload it in this RealAudio format which compressed music in a way that made it manageable to download for the first time.”

While attending New York’s Pratt Institute the following year, Sheridan dove headfirst into the world of illegal file sharing.

“Very much in the way that Napster originated, people had their own servers with files in public folders. You’d connect to the local network at your dorms and people had their mp3 collections on there. I ended up discovering a whole bunch of music that way. I downloaded a whole bunch of albums that I never had the opportunity to try because every album was an 18 dollar investment. That kind of radicalized me, and I became a fan of so much more music.”

While barely finished with his first year of art classes, a Nine Inch Nails fan site Sheridan had created caught the attention of the band, and in 1999 he was hired to design their official webpage.

“I ended up leaving school and moving down to New Orleans, living down at their studio and working there. One thing led to another and I became a creative partner, then art director, and doing more stuff,” he explains. “They'd all been kind of holed up in this studio for a couple years following up their huge album [The Downward Spiral], and it was all very secretive. I was the kid coming in with a bunch of energy and all this technological interest-like hey, check out this LimeWire thing. Everything we did with Nine Inch Nails was very confrontational with new technology.”

As an avid pirate suddenly finding himself in the midst of the music business, Sheridan saw the issue from a different angle than most of the suits he was surrounded by.

“I got brought in and we were being flown to New York, the label was taking us out to these expensive dinners and paying for everything-top notch hotels, everyone had private cars and drivers. There was so much money going around, and it wasn't the artists who were rolling in cash. I remember one of my first comments to Trent [Reznor] was, ‘Now I see why CDs cost 18 dollars.’”

Oink’s Pink Palace

During our interview, Sheridan admits that he eventually invited Reznor to Oink’s Pink Palace, a private BitTorrent tracker for music which the frontman later called “the world’s greatest record store” during an interview with Vulture.

Launched in 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace was created by a 21-year-old computer science student in England in response to legal action being taken against users of public file sharing services like Napster and The Pirate Bay. In a few short years, Oink grew into a massive community of like-minded music enthusiasts, offering high-quality downloads of virtually every album in existence.

“It was like opening a secret door to this incredible world,” Sheridan reflects. “File sharing was everywhere, but you'd never seen this level of care and detail. You see those videos now where they bring film people into the Criterion Collection-it felt like that-being invited to the ultimate music collector’s den, the private club where they show you all these records you never thought you'd have. Most people didn't have the same kind of experience, they got the LimeWire version which was the equivalent of wading through a dollar store that’s just been ransacked and shit’s all over the floor.”

By the time Nine Inch Nails’ comeback album With Teeth hit stores in 2005, it had already been available to download on Oink for a number of weeks. Rather than joining the growing number of artists angry at their fans for not waiting to pay, Sheridan says they saw it as a failure on the side of the music industry.

“We knew that the moment we sent it to the record label it was gonna leak. At the end of the day, Trent is a music fan too-if someone is like, ‘Hey, you can listen to the new album from your favorite band right now, or you can be good and wait three more weeks,’ of course you’re not going to wait. It's not really a moral question at that point. Instead of blaming them, we looked at the problem-which was the record label. That’s when we decided what we’re going to do is release the digital version first through our site, and then send it to the label. The CD can come out later.”

For the rollout of their next album, Sheridan and Reznor leaked singles via USB drives hidden inside the venues of their 2007 tour, kicking off a masterclass in viral marketing: an alternate reality game immersing fans in the dystopian future of Year Zero. Clues encoded in the mp3 files and tour merch directed participants to a string of websites and phone lines revealing further details of the album’s concept, music videos, cover art, and eventually the album in its entirety.

In October of 2007, Oink’s servers were raided by police and the website’s creator was arrested. The following day, Sheridan penned a eulogy for the website in a blog post titled The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide, where he called the website “the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known,” and added that he would gladly pay a large monthly fee for any legal music service of the same level.

The next year, Nine Inch Nails released their album The Slip for free via BitTorrent and direct download from their website, where Reznor wrote, “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years-this one's on me.” Though they weren’t the first major band to release an album for free during this era (Radiohead released In Rainbows via the pay-what-you-can model the previous year), this method marked the beginning of a change that would take the rest of the industry years to catch up to.

“It was us acknowledging how much of a download world it was, but it was also just continuing to experiment,” Sheridan says of the decision. “Part of that was acknowledging very early on that collecting your audience is very valuable. We got the email addresses of everyone that got it for free so that we could reach out to them about the tour that we were about to do, and sell tickets to that. Everyone was trying to figure out what their place was in terms of how to have an economy around music at that time. They had made music so expensive to access, while at the same time you've got Apple being like, ‘You can store a million songs in your pocket!’-okay well, I don't have a million dollars.”

What.CD: The Next Generation

Following Oink’s closure, record labels pressed on with business as usual, and a new private tracker called What.CD quickly sprung up to fill the void it left behind. In a short matter of time, the community would grow to match the vast library of its predecessor-a success which Sheridan sees as a product of the industry’s failure to adapt in an increasingly digital landscape.

“I got on What.CD and kept rolling on there. It really was an answer to something that the music industry wasn't providing at the time. Now that’s kind of acknowledged by streaming music. It has a lot of major flaws, but kids today have no concept of how amazing it is. It should cost a lot more to be able to just flow through the entire history of music. You had to have been there in that private club to realize how special it is to have that access to music for everybody now.”

Much like Oink, What.CD carried a strong emphasis on quality, and enforced a strict set of rules regarding cataloguing, seeding, audio quality, and file-naming conventions. Gaining access to the website was only possible through an invitation from another member, or by successfully completing a lengthy text interview through their internet relay chat network (IRC), a process which required a strong understanding of audio formats, ripping, torrenting, and transcoding.

Amongst communities of music nerds online, membership on What.CD was regarded as the holy grail of internet piracy. After discovering 4chan’s music board, I became aware of the website through frequent posts where users either bragged about their access to the tracker or openly begged for invites. Others insisted that the private tracker secret club was overhyped and unnecessary-a sentiment often met with a wave of responses referencing the fable of The Fox and the Grapes.

For a young music nerd such as myself looking to expand their iPod beyond a meager collection of CDs and costly iTunes downloads, What.CD was exactly what I was looking for. Eventually, I learned that someone in my Counter Strike gaming clan was a member, and was happy to send me an invite.

Finally able to navigate past the What.CD’s homepage-a mysterious login screen that read, “Beyond here is something like a utopia”-I familiarized myself with their textbook-length list of rules, and spent countless hours combing through everything the website had to offer. Virtually every album, re-release and re-pressing from any artist's discography was available in a list of high quality audio formats ranging from lossless FLAC to MP3 V2, ripped from your choice of CD, vinyl, or digital download. No longer did I have to scour music blogs and forums for active Mediafire links, or search half a dozen torrent sites for obscure albums I had read about online-the entire world of music was suddenly all in one place.

As exciting as this meticulously organized archive of free music was, I wouldn’t be able to invite my friends to let them join in right away. In order to acquire closely-guarded and highly sought-after invites, I would need to climb the rung of user classes to achieve the status of “Power User” by uploading a number of torrents myself.

The Architecture of Private Trackers

While at first it came off as unnecessarily elitist and gatekept in nature, the rules in place within the shadowy cabal of private trackers existed for a reason.

“If [trackers] are public and they're easy to get onto, that means they're also easy for law enforcement to get onto, so all they have to do is download the torrents and see who they're connecting to. Having a private site with some pretty hefty walls around it means that you are much more secure,” explains a former staff member and moderator of What.CD, who requested to go by the pseudonym ‘Brian’ during our interview.

“The other reason is that there’s no community on public sites,” he continues. “There are no accounts, there's no motivation really other than just your own goodwill, so it’s very common to download something and stop seeding it on your computer. Private trackers are built around having one account and one account only. They're built around tracking your ratio of upload to download. Those two things together provide a lot of incentive to continue seeding your content and making it available to other people. That’s what created the magic of private trackers being comprehensive and reliable.”

After passing the interview and becoming a member in 2010, Brian says his first impression of the website was something of awe.

“Very quickly I understood what this site was-how much respect people had for it, and how much work it took to build and maintain. The community was very active on the forums and IRC,” he adds. “Still to this day, I've never seen such an actively maintained network of knowledge and output, it really sucked me in. Every band or album had a word cloud that showed connected artists, and I found a lot of music just by clicking around and optimistically downloading things. There were also the collages that people would make for their own personal taste, or by themes which ranged from, ‘Here are all the Pitchfork 10s,’ to, ‘Every album that has a train on the cover.’”

The following year, Brian became a staff member himself.

“These places felt like some of the last survivors of the bulletin board style forums in a world that is now just Reddit and Instagram comments. There’s a real magic to that kind of communication. It was a lot of what I wanted in an internet community. I got involved on the interview team at the start. From there, they eventually asked if I wanted to handle more sensitive responsibilities and join the mod team.”

As a member of the mod team-the shadowy cabal within the shadowy cabal-Brian’s responsibilities mainly consisted of enforcing the rules surrounding user accounts, a task he says he handled when not occupied with high school homework assignments.

By this time, around 2011, What.CD had become the largest archive of music in human history. Taking the hard-earned lessons from their predecessor, the tracker had stayed under the radar of four-letter agencies. While operational security and potential legal action was always top of mind for staff, Brian says that during his tenure on the team, their largest perceived threat was a brief scare from the J.D. Salinger estate. On What.CD, one of their most pop