“I was responsible for the dancing baby meme,” Rob Sheridan laughs over a video call. Now better known as an accomplished graphic designer and the former creative director of Nine Inch Nails, Sheridan’s list of accolades date back to 1997, when he created a website dedicated to the low-resolution animated GIF.

The first thing I notice when our interview begins is his t-shirt, which bears the ironic slogan “HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC,” a phrase once printed on record sleeves in the UK during the ‘80s alongside a cassette tape resembling a skull and crossbones, later used in the logo of the infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. During his decades-long career in the music industry, Sheridan has stood out as one of the few outspoken advocates of media piracy.

“I was really early on the internet, making websites just as a hobby in high school to teach myself HTML,” he explains. “I remember the first time I was able to download the leak of a new song, Nine Inch Nails’ 1997 single ‘The Perfect Drug.’ It was played on a radio station and someone recorded it, and was able to upload it in this RealAudio format which compressed music in a way that made it manageable to download for the first time.”

While attending New York’s Pratt Institute the following year, Sheridan dove headfirst into the world of illegal file sharing. “Very much in the way that Napster originated, people had their own servers with files in public folders. You’d connect to the local network at your dorms and people had their mp3 collections on there. I ended up discovering a whole bunch of music that way. I downloaded a whole bunch of albums that I never had the opportunity to try because every album was an 18 dollar investment. That kind of radicalized me, and I became a fan of so much more music.”

While barely finished with his first year of art classes, a Nine Inch Nails fan site Sheridan had created caught the attention of the band, and in 1999 he was hired to design their official webpage.

“I ended up leaving school and moving down to New Orleans, living down at their studio and working there. One thing led to another and I became a creative partner, then art director, and doing more stuff,” he explains. “They'd all been kind of holed up in this studio for a couple years following up their huge album [The Downward Spiral], and it was all very secretive. I was the kid coming in with a bunch of energy and all this technological interest—like hey, check out this LimeWire thing. Everything we did with Nine Inch Nails was very confrontational with new technology.”

As an avid pirate suddenly finding himself in the midst of the music business, Sheridan saw the issue from a different angle than most of the suits he was surrounded by. “I got brought in and we were being flown to New York, the label was taking us out to these expensive dinners and paying for everything—top notch hotels, everyone had private cars and drivers. There was so much money going around, and it wasn't the artists who were rolling in cash. I remember one of my first comments to Trent [Reznor] was, ‘Now I see why CDs cost 18 dollars.’”

By the time Nine Inch Nails’ comeback album With Teeth hit stores in 2005, it had already been available to download on Oink for a number of weeks. Rather than joining the growing number of artists angry at their fans for not waiting to pay, Sheridan says they saw it as a failure on the side of the music industry. “We knew that the moment we sent it to the record label it was gonna leak. At the end of the day, Trent is a music fan too—if someone is like, ‘Hey, you can listen to the new album from your favorite band right now, or you can be good and wait three more weeks,’ of course you’re not going to wait. It's not really a moral question at that point. Instead of blaming them, we looked at the problem—which was the record label. That’s when we decided what we’re going to do is release the digital version first through our site, and then send it to the label. The CD can come out later.”

For the rollout of their next album, Sheridan and Reznor leaked singles via USB drives hidden inside the venues of their 2007 tour, kicking off a masterclass in viral marketing: an alternate reality game immersing fans in the dystopian future of Year Zero. Clues encoded in the mp3 files and tour merch directed participants to a string of websites and phone lines revealing further details of the album’s concept, music videos, cover art, and eventually the album in its entirety.

In October of 2007, Oink’s servers were raided by police and the website’s creator was arrested. The following day, Sheridan penned a eulogy for the website in a blog post titled The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide, where he called the website “the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known,” and added that he would gladly pay a large monthly fee for any legal music service of the same level.

The next year, Nine Inch Nails released their album The Slip for free via BitTorrent and direct download from their website, where Reznor wrote, “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years—this one's on me.” Though they weren’t the first major band to release an album for free during this era (Radiohead released In Rainbows via the pay-what-you-can model the previous year), this method marked the beginning of a change that would take the rest of the industry years to catch up to.

“It was us acknowledging how much of a download world it was, but it was also just continuing to experiment,” Sheridan says of the decision. “Part of that was acknowledging very early on that collecting your audience is very valuable. We got the email addresses of everyone that got it for free so that we could reach out to them about the tour that we were about to do, and sell tickets to that. Everyone was trying to figure out what their place was in terms of how to have an economy around music at that time. They had made music so expensive to access, while at the same time you've got Apple being like, ‘You can store a million songs in your pocket!’—okay well, I don't have a million dollars.”

Following Oink’s closure, record labels pressed on with business as usual, and a new private tracker called What.CD quickly sprung up to fill the void it left behind. In a short matter of time, the community would grow to match the vast library of its predecessor—a success which Sheridan sees as a product of the industry’s failure to adapt in an increasingly digital landscape. “I got on What.CD and kept rolling on there. It really was an answer to something that the music industry wasn't providing at the time. Now that’s kind of acknowledged by streaming music. It has a lot of major flaws, but kids today have no concept of how amazing it is. It should cost a lot more to be able to just flow through the entire history of music. You had to have been there in that private club to realize how special it is to have that access to music for everybody now.”

As exciting as this meticulously organized archive of free music was, I wouldn’t be able to invite my friends to let them join in right away. In order to acquire closely-guarded and highly sought-after invites, I would need to climb the rung of user classes to achieve the status of “Power User” by uploading a number of torrents myself. While at first it came off as unnecessarily elitist and gatekept in nature, the rules in place within the shadowy cabal of private trackers existed for a reason.

“If [trackers] are public and they're easy to get onto, that means they're also easy for law enforcement to get onto, so all they have to do is download the torrents and see who they're connecting to. Having a private site with some pretty hefty walls around it means that you are much more secure,” explains a former staff member and moderator of What.CD, who requested to go by the pseudonym ‘Brian’ during our interview.

“The other reason is that there’s no community on public sites,” he continues. “There are no accounts, there's no motivation really other than just your own goodwill, so it’s very common to download something and stop seeding it on your computer. Private trackers are built around having one account and one account only. They're built around tracking your ratio of upload to download. Those two things together provide a lot of incentive to continue seeding your content and making it available to other people. That’s what created the magic of private trackers being comprehensive and reliable.”

After passing the interview and becoming a member in 2010, Brian says his first impression of the website was something of awe. “Very quickly I understood what this site was—how much respect people had for it, and how much work it took to build and maintain. The community was very active on the forums and IRC,” he adds. “Still to this day, I've never seen such an actively maintained network of knowledge and output, it really sucked me in. Every band or album had a word cloud that showed connected artists, and I found a lot of music just by clicking around and optimistically downloading things. There were also the collages that people would make for their own personal taste, or by themes which ranged from, ‘Here are all the Pitchfork 10s,’ to, ‘Every album that has a train on the cover.’”

The following year, Brian became a staff member himself. “These places felt like some of the last survivors of the bulletin board style forums in a world that is now just Reddit and Instagram comments. There’s a real magic to that kind of communication. It was a lot of what I wanted in an internet community. I got involved on the interview team at the start. From there, they eventually asked if I wanted to handle more sensitive responsibilities and join the mod team.”

As a member of the mod team—the shadowy cabal within the shadowy cabal—Brian’s responsibilities mainly consisted of enforcing the rules surrounding user accounts, a task he says he handled when not occupied with high school homework assignments.

By this time, around 2011, What.CD had become the largest archive of music in human history. Taking the hard-earned lessons from their predecessor, the tracker had stayed under the radar of four-letter agencies. While operational security and potential legal action was always top of mind for staff, Brian says that during his tenure on the team, their largest perceived threat was a brief scare from the J.D. Salinger estate.

On What.CD, one of their most popular functions was the request system, a member-led bounty economy driven by the incentive of gaining valuable upload ratio. If a user wanted something that wasn’t already available on the website, they could create a “request” for it, offering a portion of their own upload credits to whoever was able to fulfill it. Typically, these requests could be filled by spending around $20 on Amazon or iTunes and uploading the files. For highly-sought after releases yet to hit shelves, other users chipped in on the bounty, creating a massive reward for whichever record store employee was willing to “borrow” a copy from the backroom before the release date, resulting in the website frequently becoming the originating source of album leaks online. The largest request on the website was for “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” an unpublished short story by Salinger only known to exist in a locked room of the Princeton Library, where it was available by appointment to read under the strict supervision of staff.

“It was basically like a long running joke that it would never get filled,” Brian laughs. “And then somebody fucking did it.” In November of 2013, a What.CD user tracked down one of the 25 copies of the manuscript allegedly printed in 1999 in order to fill the request. The unexpected leak made headlines around the world, and the torrent file was quickly pulled. “It was known that the Salinger estate was very legally motivated, very litigious,” he says. “It would never be allowed to actually be on the website, so the hand was forced.”

While the unwanted attention raised alarms amongst staff, Brian says nothing came of it. “To the best of my knowledge, [action from law enforcement] never happened until the very end, and even that was pretty minor, but we were constantly paranoid about it. It was a huge thing on the back of our mind at all times.”

In November of 2016, users attempting to log into What.CD were shocked by a message displayed on the homepage, stating that, Due to some recent events, What.CD is shutting down. We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

According to a French cybercrime website, authorities had seized a number of What.CD’s servers earlier that day. The sudden closure came as a surprise to their 165,000+ registered users, including staff like Brian. The site never returned, and no further details were ever made public to the mourning userbase. Even today, speaking about the loss of What.CD with an Anonymous stranger feels like recounting the death of a close friend.

“I feel like it’s probably okay to share the top level detail about this,” Brian says somberly. “What.CD’s security was very strong. It was run by very smart people who knew their stuff about being systems operators. Ultimately, some servers in the network were taken down by a French enforcement arm. They were just reverse proxies, which didn’t store anything actually sensitive, except maybe a connection that led to the real servers. That was the first and only time—that I'm aware of—that any kind of enforcement had been launched against the site. Even though nothing happened, even though there is a world where we could have just replaced the server and switched all the hosting in that country to something else and continued onward, the admins made the very reasonable decision to say, We are now in a different sector of risk, we’ve gone from zero actions taken to one action taken, we’re abandoning ship—and started deleting everything. There was no way of knowing whether they would follow the trail to the next server. It was obviously a very difficult decision and the admin I talked to after was really upset about it, but I'm sure many people agree it was also the sensible choice to make.”

Coinciding with the shutdown, streaming services had begun to reach the masses. As CD sales continued to plummet, labels moved away from physical releases, and major leaks became increasingly infrequent. Suddenly, anyone with a $10 monthly subscription had access to the entire world of music without even having to download it to their hard drive. In the wake of What.CD’s closure, I begrudgingly became a paying Spotify user. The record labels had finally won the war against music piracy.

Looking at the state of things now, much of what Sheridan predicted in his 2007 blog post has come true. Music has more or less become free, and we finally can pay a nominal fee for a service once offered only by illegal websites like Oink. Reflecting on his thoughts from nearly two decades ago, Sheridan isn’t so certain that we’ve arrived in a promised land.

“The idea at the time that music will eventually be free was more of a statement of where this is heading. Streaming is not economically sustainable for artists. The solution to all of this should have also been something that renegotiated how artists are paid for music. Instead, you've got artists who can’t even afford their bills even though they’re getting millions of streams a month, and you have Spotify paying Joe Rogan 100 million dollars. Artists are the ones being mistreated, while the middlemen are making a ton of money. There’s this whole world where people exist just to show up in the middle and take a big chunk of the money from something they had no part in creating. The Spotify model is like saying your favorite restaurant should just be giving you free food until you decide to buy a t-shirt. If artists weren’t also being screwed on the touring side, then you could think of streaming as marketing, but there’s too many examples being dangled in front of our face of how much money is being funneled away to billionaires and corporations, and artists always come last. That’s my frustration with where we’ve ended.”