(Consider this a replacement for my usual Illegal Leak of the Week post.)

Jeff, the cell phone towers blew up?! Good Christ, man. First off, like many have said before me, something else will be along in OiNK’s stead before too long, and in spite of your worries, the next thing will be more robust than any freeloader/downloader deserves (just as Soulseek was better than Napster, just as OiNK was better than SuprNova). In fact, if you wait a coupl’a weeks and do a little digging, you’ll find a fair share of private torrent sites still in existence that will cater to your non-mainstream tastes.

But even if that weren’t the case…is the site’s death really that awful?

If someone from the Dutch government were to bust down my door today and go after my hard drives, I’d try to apply a very odd (and probably awful) defense—I’ve barely listened to any of what’s in there. In my two years of OiNK membership, I downloaded at least 800 music torrents. Probably way more than that, as I’ve lost count, and more than a few of those were deluxe box sets. Some were things I downloaded just for the helluvit (read: Britney), and some have proven to be great surprises that drove me to the record store. But most have been lost in the shuffle of endless downloads. Like most torrent tracker sites, OiNK had a “Top 50” feature to rank torrents by popularity, either for the day or the week, and that feature put a lot of weird or unpublicized albums on my radar that I might’ve never bothered with otherwise. But the drawback was that it created a compulsion to gorge and gorge and gorge.

As a result, I’ve found myself not sitting with albums and giving them the kind of loving, replay treatment that I did years ago, back when I only downloaded something based on a great magazine review, a great concert or a friend’s suggestion. This is a pervasive problem in the world of MP3 blogs, as people grow too eager to announce and jump on a new act because it seems to stand out from the hectic MP3 fray…and based on the blogosphere’s reaction to OiNK, and chats I’ve had with a few MP3 blogger friends, I’ve come to realize that those guys didn’t just rely on OiNK. They fell into the same overload trap that I did.

Perhaps I’m an exception to the OiNK experience and I’m projecting. Based on the stats of the site and the outpouring of music geek tears, though, I doubt it. Either way, I’m going to enjoy a break from checking that site six times a day. Gonna listen to a few records that have been collecting dust in the hard drive for at least the two weeks before the next great replacement assumedly takes shape.