I am a member of the pirate generation. When I arrived at college in 1997, I had never heard of an MP3. By the end of my first term, I had filled my 2GB hard drive with hundreds of bootlegged songs. By graduation, I had six 20GB drives, all full. By 2005, when I moved to New York, I had collected 1,500GB of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth. It took an hour just to cue up my library, and if you ordered the songs alphabetically by artist, you’d have to listen for a year and a half to get from Abba to ZZ Top.

I pirated on an industrial scale, but told no one. It was an easy secret to keep. You never saw me at the record store and I didn’t DJ parties. The files were procured on chat channels and through Napster and BitTorrent; I haven’t purchased an album with my own money since the turn of the millennium. The vinyl collectors of old had filled whole basements with dusty album jackets, but my digital collection could fit in a shoebox.

Most of this music I never listened to. I actually hated Abba, and although I owned four ZZ Top albums, I couldn’t tell you the name of one. What was really driving me? Now, years later, I can see that what I really wanted was to belong to an elite and rarefied group. This was not a conscious impulse and, had you suggested it to me, I would have denied it. But that was the perverse lure of the piracy underground. It wasn’t just a way to get the music – it was its own subculture.

I was at the very forefront of the digital download trend. Had I been just a couple of years older, I doubt I would have become so involved. My older friends regarded piracy with scepticism and sometimes outright hostility. This was true even for those who loved music – in fact, it was especially true for them. Record collecting had been a subculture, too, and, for that vanishing breed, finding albums proved to be an exhilarating challenge, one that involved scouring garage sales, sifting through bargain bins. But for me, and those younger, collecting was effortless, the music was simply there. The only hard part was figuring out what to listen to.

As I was browsing through my enormous list of albums one day a few years ago, a fundamental question struck me: where had all this music come from, anyway? I didn’t know the answer, and as I researched it, I realised that no one else did either. There had been heavy coverage of the MP3 phenomenon and of Apple, Napster and the Pirate Bay, but there had been little talk of the inventors and almost none at all of those who actually pirated the files.

Napster was – briefly – an enormously popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service.

I became obsessed, and as I researched more, I began to find the most wonderful things. I found the manifesto from the original MP3 piracy clique, a document so old I needed an MS-DOS emulator just to view it. I found the cracked shareware demo for the original MP3 encoder, which even its inventors had considered lost. I found a secret database that tracked 30 years of leaks – software, music, movies – from every major piracy crew, dating back to 1982. I found secret websites in Micronesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, registered to shell corporations in Panama, the true proprietors being anyone’s guess. Buried in thousands of pages of court documents, I found wiretap transcripts and FBI surveillance logs and testimonies in which the details of insidious global conspiracies had been laid bare.

My assumption had been that music piracy was a crowdsourced phenomenon. That is, I believed the MP3s I’d downloaded had been sourced from scattered uploaders around the globe and that this diffuse network of rippers was not organised in any meaningful way. This assumption was wrong. While some of the files were indeed untraceable artefacts from random denizens of the internet, the vast majority of pirated MP3s came from just a few organised releasing groups. By using data analysis, it was often possible to trace those MP3s back to their place of primary origination. Many times, it was possible not just to track the pirated file back to a general origin, but actually to a specific time and a specific person.

That was the real secret: the internet was made of people. Piracy was a social phenomenon and once you knew where to look, you could begin to make out individuals in the crowd. Engineers, executives, employees, investigators, convicts, even burnouts – they all played a role.

I started in Germany, where a team of ignored inventors, in a blithe attempt to make a few thousand bucks from a struggling business venture, had accidentally crippled a global industry. In so doing, they became extremely wealthy. In interviews, these men attempted to distance themselves from the chaos they had unleashed, but it was impossible to begrudge them their success. They had invented a technology that would conquer the world.

Then to New York, where I found a powerful music executive in his early 70s who had twice cornered the global market on rap. Nor was that his only achievement; as I researched more, I realised that this man was popular music. From Stevie Nicks to Taylor Swift, there had been almost no major act from the last four decades that he had not somehow touched. Facing an unprecedented onslaught of piracy, his business had suffered, but he had fought valiantly to protect the industry and the artists that he loved.

From the high rises of midtown Manhattan I turned my attention to Scotland Yard and FBI headquarters, where dogged teams of investigators had been assigned the thankless task of tracking this digital samizdat back to its source, a process that often took years. Following their trail to a flat in northern England, I found a high-fidelity obsessive who had overseen a digital library that would have impressed even Borges. From there to Silicon Valley, where another entrepreneur had also designed a mind-bending technology, but one that he had utterly failed to monetise. Then to Iowa, then to Los Angeles, back to New York again, London, Sarasota, Oslo, Baltimore, Tokyo, and then, for a long time, a string of dead ends.

Until finally I found myself in the strangest place of all: a small town in western North Carolina that seemed as far from the global confluence of technology and music as could be. This was Shelby, a landscape of clapboard Baptist churches and faceless corporate franchises, where one man, acting in almost total isolation, had over a period of eight years cemented his reputation as the most fearsome digital pirate of all. Many of the files I had pirated – perhaps even a majority of them – had originated with him. He was the patient zero of internet music piracy, but almost no one knew his name. The things he told me were astonishing. Once, I was moved to ask: “Dell, why haven’t you told anybody any of this before?”

“Man, no one ever asked.”

Oink: ‘a carefully curated digital archive with a fanatical emphasis on high-fidelity encodings’.

Extract: Oink promoted a utopian vision – and it was one that worked

In 2001, a new type of software – BitTorrent – was launched that simplified and sped up the online filesharing process. Files were shared peer-to-peer but had to be tracked by a central host site. The best of these, which grew from the humblest of origins, was the legendary music tracker known as Oink’s Pink Palace…

Oink was Alan Ellis, a 21-year-old computer science student from the United Kingdom. Born in Leeds and raised in Manchester, he had enrolled in 2002 on a computer science programme at the University of Teesside, Middlesbrough. Ellis was shy, intensely private and polite. He stood only 5ft 5in, but he was an avid squash player and kept his body in peak physical condition. His hair and eyes were dark, and his square, handsome face was bisected by a pronounced dimple in his chin.



Ellis found his university education lacking. The course curriculum seemed geared to an early era of computing conducted in languages such as Fortran and Lisp, which had been dead for centuries – the programming equivalents of ancient Greek and Latin. There was no focus on commerce or contemporary computer trends, and there was a baffling lack of interest in the internet. In conversations with potential employers, Ellis kept hearing of demand for newer programming languages such as PHP, for web scripting, or SQL, for database administration, but the university offered courses in neither.

So he decided to teach himself. In his spare time, Ellis downloaded a few open-source software packages and familiarised himself with the basics of both languages. Although he wasn’t expecting to make any money, his idea was to learn employable skills by running a website that functioned almost like a business, serving dynamic requests to a variety of users. A torrent tracker was perfect in this regard: it used an SQL database to sort the torrents, and PHP to present them to users.

On 30 May 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace went live. Unlike the Pirate Bay, which acted mostly as a link repository, with limited oversight or quality control, Oink would be something else entirely: a carefully curated digital archive with a fanatical emphasis on high-fidelity encodings.

Ellis began an aggressive branding campaign. He ran a contest to determine the site’s mascot. The winner was a plump piglet wearing a pair of headphones, christened Oink. The branding campaign put a friendly face on the tracker’s increasingly demanding technical requirements. Ellis was becoming a quality snob. He permitted only MP3s ripped from the original compact discs, and emphasised archival completion. There were rules governing how music was to be tagged and catalogued, rules regarding how torrents were to be uploaded, rules regarding album art and liner notes, rules regarding behaviour in the site’s moderated forums. There were even rules outlining how “cute” members’ avatars had to be, the precedent set by the hard-rocking piglet himself.

Being a member of Oink was demanding. Users had to maintain a minimum ratio of material uploaded to downloaded. That is, a user had to give music to get music. The easiest way to do that was to upload a new album, one that was not already on the site. And the easiest way to do that was to get your hands on an original copy on CD and encode it to an MP3.

Much of this material had been encoded before, during the millennial Napster frenzy. Glitchy, low-quality files had abounded on Napster – files misnamed or mistagged, files attributed to the wrong artist, files with glaring audio flaws. To an exacting audiophile like Ellis, the Oink way was the only way, and he was recreating the world’s music libraries from scratch. Yes, he was saying, I know a lot of this material is out there already, but we’re going to do it again, and this time we’re going to do it right.

Alan Ellis arrives at Teesside Crown Court in 2010. He was found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud. Photograph: Rod Minchin/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

Ellis had timed the launch of his mission well. The ancient race of vinyl enthusiasts who had once haunted record stores and swap meets was dying out, superseded by a mutant breed of torrent obsessives. The snobbishness and exclusivity of Oink were exactly what this new group was looking for: a place to show off their dismissive, elitist attitudes about both technology and music. The High Fidelity types were still concerned with high fidelity, of course; only now, instead of exchanging angry letters about phonograph needles in the back pages of Playboy, they flamed one another over the relative merits of various MP3 byte rates in hundred-page threads on the Oink forums.

The stricter the site’s rules became, the more people showed up. Invitations became a hot commodity, fuelling demand. Oink became the premier destination for the tech-obsessed music nerd (and his close cousin, the music-obsessed tech nerd). Public trackers such as the Pirate Bay were overrun by plebs, while Oink members were knowledgeable, cool, and occasionally even socially well adjusted. By the end of 2004, several thousand users had signed on, the kind of core base of dedicated filesharing peers that could support exponential growth.

By then, the tracker was costing several hundred dollars a month to maintain. In early 2005, Ellis posted the address of a PayPal account for the site and made a polite request for donations. Cash began to trickle in, denominated in currencies from all over the globe.

More than money, Oink’s army donated labour. Oinkers uploaded their own CD collections, and the CD collections of their friends. Some of the site’s elite “torrent masters” uploaded a thousand albums or more. As Scene participants had done before them, Oinkers started to search eBay for rarities and import pressings. As record stores started closing, Oinkers showed up to buy their fire sale inventory in bulk, and these compulsive uploaders were the music retailers’ last, best customers.

First, there were 1,000 albums. Then 10,000. Then 100,000. Ellis, the elitist, presided over it all. It was a beautiful thing: no low-quality encodes, no fakes, no dupes, no movies, no TV shows. Just music. All of it, in perfect digital clarity. All the music ever recorded.

Oink grew explosively. By the beginning of 2006, the site had 100,000 users and hosted torrents for nearly a million distinct albums, making it four times bigger than the iTunes store. The site’s user base was uploading 1,500 new torrents each day. Every album was available in multiple formats, and soon Oink had complete, thoroughly documented discographies for any musician you could care to name. Think of the most obscure release from the most obscure artist you knew; it was there, on Oink, in every issue and reissue, including redacted promo copies and split seven-inch records and bonus tracks from Japanese pressings you’d never even heard of.

Take the artist Nick Drake. Obscure in his lifetime, Drake sold only 5,000 copies of his final album, Pink Moon, before overdosing on pills in 1974 at the age of 26. Over the next 25 years his reputation grew slowly. He became a “musician’s musician”, beloved by connoisseurs but unknown to the public. Then, in 1999, the title track of Pink Moon was featured in a commercial for the Volkswagen Cabrio: young trendsetters on a night-time joyride, scored with the chronically depressed singer’s lyrics about the meaninglessness of life.

The campaign was a bust from Volkswagen’s perspective (the Cabrio was discontinued within three years). But the effect on Drake’s back catalogue was dramatic – the advertisers had done a better job selling the music than the car. Within a few months of the commercial’s first airing, Pink Moon had sold more copies than it had in the previous quarter century.

You could learn all this on Oink, which acted almost as a museum exhibit of Drake’s critical afterlife, charting the repeated attempts to cash in on his growing critical and commercial stature. The website’s incomparable archives had Pink Moon ripped from eight different sources: the exceptionally rare, extremely valuable first-edition 1972 vinyl from Island Records; the 1986 box set CD reissue from Hannibal Records; the 1990 CD release from Island; the 1992 CD re-reissue from Hannibal; the post-Cabrio 2000 CD re-re-reissue from Island; the accompanying Simply Vinyl 180-gram audiophile re-re-reissue, also from 2000; the 2003 Island Records digitally remastered re-re-re-reissue on compact disc; and the Universal Music Japanese vinyl re-re-re-reissue from 2007. Each of the reissues was then encoded into an alphabet soup of file types – FLAC, AAC and MP3 – so that ultimately there were more than 30 options for downloading this one album alone.

You couldn’t find stuff like this on iTunes. The size and scope of Oink’s catalogue outdid any online music purveyor, and given its distributed nature, the archive was essentially indestructible. But its growth made it difficult to maintain. Alan Ellis now spent almost all his free time keeping the site running, and as his grades suffered, he was forced to repeat a year at university. By the summer of 2006, Oink was getting 10,000 page views a day, and the hosting bills had grown to thousands of dollars a month. Several times, Ellis ran pledge drives on the site’s front page. The response from his community was overwhelming. In the span of a year Ellis’s army donated over £200,000 – nearly half a million dollars. People liked Oink. They were even willing to pay for it.

Why were users so devoted to Oink? The torrent technology wasn’t easy to master, a good ratio was difficult to maintain, the forum moderators were Nazis, and uploading even a single byte of data to the site technically constituted a felony-level conspiracy. A lot of the stuff on Oink was also available from the Pirate Bay and Kazaa, and, past a certain point, it would be easier just to pay for iTunes, right? Theories abounded. The classical economist saw the benefits of unlimited consumer choice outweighing the cost of ratio maintenance and the risk of getting caught. The behavioural economist saw a user base accustomed to consuming music for free and now habitually disinclined to pay for it. The political theorist saw a base of active dissidents fighting against the “second enclosure of the commons,” attempting to preserve the internet from corporate control. The sociologist saw group-joiners, people for whom the exclusivity of Oink was precisely its appeal.

The best answers to the question, though, were culled from the site itself. Oink’s heavily trafficked user forums revealed a community that resembled Ellis himself: technically literate middle-class twentysomethings, mostly male, enrolled in university or employed in entry-level jobs. A significant number of members weren’t even that lucky, but were instead what the British government called “Neets”: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Concerts were a popular topic of discussion; so were drugs. One of the busiest threads on the site simply asked “Why Do You Pirate Music?” Thousands of different answers came in. Oinkers talked of cost, contempt for major labels, the birth of a new kind of community, courageous political activism, and sometimes simply greed. The biggest draw of all was the mere existence of such forums. They were a place to learn about emerging technology, about new bands, about underground shows. iTunes was just a store, basically a mall – Oink was a community.

Ellis consciously cultivated this ethos. He seemed at times to promote an almost utopian vision, except his utopia actually worked. The result was illegal, of course, but it was also something of great value, produced cooperatively, and built in naked opposition to the expectations of in-kind reward that supposedly governed human behaviour in the capitalist age.

A less friendly sort of attention came from rights holders. By 2007, the site’s inbox was overflowing with takedown emails. MIA, the Go! Team, and Prince all succeeded in having their record catalogues pulled from the site. Ellis began to worry about his exposure. Oink had gotten too big, too quickly. His legal argument was that the site did not actually host any copyrighted files. And, technically speaking, this was true. Oink hosted only torrents. The files those torrents linked to were located not on the Holland server but in a distributed library that existed on computers around the globe. Had Ellis bothered to consult a lawyer, he would have quickly learned that the law did not respect this distinction. But he never did.

And if Oink was a criminal, he wasn’t a very good one. Until recently, he had been running the server from his house, with his IP address available for anyone to see. He had logged all site activity, with users’ upload and download histories stored right next to their names and email. And with two seconds of research into the internet’s domain name registry, you could get Oink’s real name: “Alan Ellis.”

The evidence trail amounted to the easiest bust in the history of online piracy. On Tuesday 23 October 2007, Ellis woke before dawn to prepare for another day in the IT pit at the Middlesbrough chemical company where he had worked since graduating. As he did every morning, he logged into Oink as administrator, checked the server logs, and read the overnight messages from his deputised lieutenants. Then the door slammed open and a dozen police officers swarmed into his room.

Ellis’s bank accounts were frozen simultaneously. Over in Manchester, his father was inexplicably arrested as well, and charged with money laundering. Alan Ellis’s home computer was seized. So were the Holland servers, which contained the IP and email addresses of all 180,000 Oink members. Ellis had not planned for this contingency, and the torrents Oink served went dark.

The police grilled Ellis for over an hour in his apartment. He was reluctant to speak. The sun came up outside. He was invited to the police station for further conversation. Looking to make a show of force, the cops had alerted the UK’s tabloid press, who had been waiting outside Ellis’s building since daybreak. Handcuffed, he was escorted from his bedroom and into the glare of the photographers’ flashing lights.

Postscript: Alan Ellis was tried, aged 26, for conspiracy to defraud at Teesside crown court in January 2010, the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal filesharing. He was found not guilty. After the trial, he never gave another interview, and there was no trace of him to be found online. While researching this book, after months of effort, I received from him a single email regarding his time at Oink: “It’s a part of my life which I’m happy is now behind me.”

How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt is published on 18 June by The Bodley Head (£20). Buy it for £16 here