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.