Will OiNK’s Shutdown Cause People To Rush The Shops? (Probably Not.)

So yeah, OiNK is gone, never to return, cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth. But there’s one question that is out there: Will shutting it down really benefit the music industry’s bottom line? We called on CMJ panel chronicler/industry observer Ryan Catbird to share his thoughts on that topic, as well as the increasingly fragmented attention economy.

By this point, we’ve seen the gamut of responses to OiNK’s demise, and though there were a few thoughtful and well-reasoned responses (DJ Rupture’s, for example), the majority of the responses seem to be rote parroting of old standbys (“LABELS ARE GREEDY AND EVIL!” “ARTISTS SHOULDN’T EXPECT TO BE PAID!”).

I don’t want to try to argue against those old tropes, as much as I love banging my head against an immovable brick wall; I just want to point out another facet of this whole “OiNK Shutdown” situation. I concede that while file-sharing has (obviously!) contributed to the music industry’s woes in the past 10 years, we shouldn’t underestimate the toll that’s been taken by the fragmentation of consumers’ time and money. It’s a very bad assumption, in my opinion, to think that the shutdown of OiNK (or even the complete dismantling of file-trading) can/will work as a panacea for the industry’s current woes.

I don’t believe that 2000 downloads of an album on Oink equates to 2000 lost sales of an album–it simply equates to 2000 people hearing the album that otherwise wouldn’t have done. (I’m generalizing, but you get my point.) Now that OiNK is gone, most of those kids are not suddenly going to go out and drop $15 for that new John Vanderslice CD because now that’s the only way they can get it–they’re just going to go without it. And that doesn’t seem like it benefits anyone.

I mean, which is better? Selling 1000 CDs and having 1000 people hear your music, or selling 1000 CDs, but having 3000 people hear your music? To the accountant, it doesn’t matter; the bottom line remains “1000 CDs sold.” But what about to the artist, or, for that matter, to anyone who has an interest in that artist’s career in the long term (manager, label, booking agent… the list goes on)? I’m not saying that OiNK, or other free P2P, is the way to do things–hell, I don’t know what the answer actually is. But what I do know is that if the industry actually thinks that banishment of P2P will suddenly rid them of all their problems, and that suddenly, the sales figures will just go back to the “pre-P2P ’90s glory days,” I think they’re in for a rude awakening.

Sales aren’t bad because kids are “getting for free” something that they would otherwise be paying for. Sales are bad because “free” is the only way many kids are willing to get it anymore.The people who are going to pay for the music are the ones who are already paying for it; they’re the people who show up in those sales charts every week. Don’t expect that the membership of OiNK is now suddenly going to start showing up in those numbers, because it’s not going to happen. The problem isn’t just access to product, it’s interest in product.

It’s been said many, many times, and it sounds very simple, but the fact is there are just a lot more things for people to invest their time in these days. I recognize, of course, that money is a hugely important factor in this discussion, but maybe there’s something that’s even more valuable than money these days, and that’s being able to keep and hold peoples’ attention, getting them to invest some of their limited time in your art/artist/release/etc. That way, at least you’ve still got them interested in the music, on the whole, and ideally, maybe some kind of financial compensation will shake out of that somehow, somewhere, down the line.

The saddest part? I fear that the aggressive dismantling of these P2P communities will ultimately just have the effect of making the kids become even less interested in music, and they’ll just devote more of their time to other stuff–games, YouTube, whatever the hell it is they do with their cellphones all day long.