What.cd shuts down
Music torrent and invite-only community What.cd has shut down. The site was raided yesterday and 12 servers were seized. OVH France hosted its massive library and while the site was regarded as unsafe for pirates, the What.CD admins trusted the host. As one commenter on The Verge’s article says: “OVH started terminating seedbox accounts in 2010, and were generally regarded as untrustworthy by BitTorrent enthusiasts ever since.”
What.cd had very strict rules regarding the quality of the music shared. While the site offered an extended library, unlike any other music service, it wasn’t a major source for leaks. This was often due to leaks being transcoded and rarely made it onto the site.
It’s worth mentioning that an alternative to What.cd might pop-up in the not so distant future. What.CD and Waffles.fm were created as a reaction to OiNK shutting down in 2007. OiNK was the original invite-only music torrent site with a music library spanning both commercial and rare music.
I did an unofficial Radiohead remix in 2007 and shared it on What CD. Thanks to the site the track went viral and made it to a lot of major publications. This lead to me doing official remixes and landed me my first record contract. And while I understand that the site couldn’t last forever, its extensive library and artists like myself being able to promote our music will be missed.
I hope Kingdom Leaks is safe… It’s currently my first choice, especially because they’re sharing Zippyshare links, unlike Get Leaks – new ads on Uploaded made it almost unusable…
The adds don’t bother me. What bothers me is that Uploaded is too slow and zippyshare is so quick!
Score!
The shut down of What.cd felt like a death of a very close friend to me. To read more about what they contributed to music users around the world and what they were about go to:
http://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-greatest-music-collection-in-the-world/
They will be missed!!!
RIP
I only just found out about this, man this is actually a huge loss to the internet music community.
Missing home ):