Further Down the Spiral: OiNK Shutdown Makes Trent Reznor Sad(der)

As if Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor didn't have enough to be bummed out about, authorities had to go and shut down the singer's beloved file-sharing service, OiNK. New York Magazine has an interview with Reznor and hip-hop poet Saul Williams that discusses their recent collaboration, including the closing of OiNK and >Radiohead's latest release (for which Reznor jokingly claims to have spent $5,000).

Says Reznor of OiNK: "I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted."

But here's the real money quote: "If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up."






Reznor certainly has a point, with respect to coolness. iTunes is far more like a mini-mall chain store than the local indie shop that specializes in original vinyl pressings of 13th Floor Elevators records. Sites like eMusic offer something of an alternative, in terms of pricing, format, and music selection, but it's true that no legal sites have managed to take the place of the cool little shop on the corner.

As to Reznor's point about payment, I don't think that anyone is under the impression that the singer represents the average OiNK user, in that he is a rock star, and the vast majority of OiNK users that I've encountered have been college students or recent graduates with a minimal number of platinum records under their belts.

I think there's a lot to be said about monetizing some equivalent to the service, but anyone who expects a service like OiNK to maintain its numbers should it go legit are missing the point that free music will always be a large part of the appeal of file-sharing services.

Granted, services such as Napster and BitTorrent lost some appeal in that they weren't able to monetize their old formats without making major changes, but it will always be hard to compete with free, which is where sites like Imeem are getting it right: by re-imagining the traditional structure of music industry commerce and by embracing free.

The next step in the process of realizing this dream of Web-based equivalents to indie record shops is opening the space to more direct competition.