NIN’s Trent Reznor Claims To Have Account At Torrent Site OiNK

By now you’ve probably gotten a bit familiar already with OiNK, a peer-to-peer venue that recently had itself publicly manhandled and forced offline by both Dutch and English authorities last week. And you’ve likely received word that The Pirate Bay promised to “re-launch” the operation, albeit with a ‘B’ added to its title (so “BOiNK” will be its new name; cheeky, eh?).

Well, today you’re going to get another little factoid to add to your daily dose of nifty news to do with the torrent-centric online outlet. It turns out that OiNK, a popular yet widely unknown linktastic Web-based institution, has itself a fan of the musical world widely known.

Uh huh, that’s correct. Mr Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails fame, a man idolized as much for his soundtrack as his persistent anti-Big-Media rhetoric, divulged recently in an interview with New York Magazine (co-interview, actually, alongside Saul Williams, the poet/hip-hop artist) that he had in fact registered an account with the website and “frequented it quite often.”

The reason for his regular visitations to the place (before it got canned, of course), according to the transcript of the interview, is that “at the end of the day…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.” Reznor added, “If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid….”

There you have it, folks. Chalk another one up for service, convenience, and demand for a quality product – and the absence of most all of those things in the current market of legal options – as a primary reason for the proliferation of copyrighted content on the Web. And, subsequently, for the industry’s ills.

Talking seriously here for a moment, though, there’s a lot of truth to what Reznor has said, and what many aficionados of the peer-to-peer world have claimed for many years now. It is, in short, that the consumer wants what he/she wants.

And because advances in digital technologies have enabled more and more people to enjoy things at greater leisure and convenience, they’re naturally widely adopted. The conflict between record industry and consumer is borne of the fact that the companies controlling the majority of the market allowed themselves to be subverted by the list of new technologies that have risen in the last decade or so, rather than “bit the bullet” in embracing them and working with them (to their advantage.)

Instead, however, Big Media grew very fearful of things they didn’t quite understand (a reaction quite natural in many facets of live, really), and tried to stomp them out any which way they could. Of course, those “things” have been like ants, replicating like mad, and practically impossible to eradicate entirely, so they’ve proliferated. Exponentially so.

Now the music industry is growing tired, having lifted and dropped its boot on consumers one too many times (no to avail), a though it seems to have enough energy to maintain regular attacks on entities like OiNK and so forth for a short while longer, there’s absolutely no way it can possibly continue on its current track and maintain its status as “Big Media.”

For the record (no pun intended), I’m personally grateful for what Trent Reznor and others like him are doing. It’s quite important, no doubt, considering all that’s been chronicled during the digital age thus far. Having some well-placed and intelligent people backing the pro-consumer movement “behind enemy lines” is extremely necessary. I’m sure many (and perhaps even all) of you feel the same.

So here’s to getting our way, eventually. Even if it is obtained the hard way.