RIP Oink’s Pink Palace - May 30, 2004 to October 23, 2007
Oink’s Pink Palace, my favorite site on the entire internet was shut down this week. October 23, 2007 - a sad day indeed.
I don’t think I could give a better epitaph than DJ Rupture did on his blog. A musician aware enough to actually be encouraged when he found his music available on the revolutionary sharing site.
“Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7? on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12?, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…”
http://www.negrophonic.com/2007/defending-the-pig-oink-croaks/
Getting invited to Oink was one of the most exciting and vindicating experiences of my internet life. The black market community of music distribution through file sharing has always been intensely interesting to me; it was at the heart of my initial romance with the internet. In the beginning, there were simply websites with mp3s for download and lists of ftp sites that were traded around on IRC. Then came Napster, which brought the masses into the game, and then came Soulseek, which shared Napster’s user-friendliness and simplicity of use, but managed to stay underground for reasons i don’t really understand to this day.
But Oink was a revelation. It was truly a music lover’s paradise. It was a community based on love of music, sharing, cuteness (avatars were required to be cute in an endearing attempt to foster kind communication), quality, and organization. It remains the benchmark for what a music service can and should be. I guess stuff like that is always destined to come up against the harsh reality of “too good to be true.” Oink, you will be missed.
