“New York” Tries To Sum Up Music Leak Culture

If you’ve paid half-attention to the news cycle as regards illegal file sharing over the last 12 months, then you’ve already gleaned the gist of “Ripped To Shreds,” where writer Adrienne Day interviews the founder of former BitTorrent hub OiNK, nameless members (and ex-members) of “ripping crews,” small label owners, and journalists to outline the rise in online leak culture for a print readership that will presumably still be mildly shocked by the fact that “many of the saboteurs come from within the industry itself,” that record labels and journalists and bands and friends of bands and nameless studio hands are all complicit, to one degree of malice or another, in putting records online for anyone to steal before they’ve been officially released. But here’s a thumbnail.

Discussed: Crummy CD sales possibly (but who knows) related to the rise of illegal downloading; what a torrent is, exactly; the rise and fall of OiNK; the minor fiasco relating to Ba Da Bing records accusing writer Erik Davis of leaking Beirut’s Flying Cub Cup; the specious reasoning of full-time pirates; the specious lawsuits launched by the industry; the uncertainty over what leak culture means for the health of indie labels and bands; Radiohead!; the impossibility of stopping any of this.

Not discussed: The increasing trend toward indie bands and labels (anonymously) leaking their own records ahead of time to drum up publicity; larger labels “leaking” material to connected bloggers and key online locations to drum up publicity.

Things I will never understand after reading a million of these articles: the “Robin Hood”/”Johnny Appleseed” theories leakers have about their work bringing the music to teh people. (But let’s not get into that again.)

Ripped To Shreds [New York]