2 days ago, on Thursday November 17th, servers that hosted what was the biggest private music torrent tracker in the world were seized by french authorities. Currently there is not much information about what exactly happened but What.cd's official twitter account has confirmed that the site is gone.
News came as a shock for the site's users who are still scrambling for an alternative. Browsing around the web for user's reactions one can see the importance the website had for many people.
This sentiment is common among the userbase, the sense that there was a great loss in terms of information and music catalogue. Why should users of a music pirating website feel so upset? After all, there are many other music pirating website still online, not to mention all other streaming alternatives such as Spotify and Google Music. What matters to such users is the fact that it's not just about pirating music, it was a way to build the world's largest music library. As of the date of the takedown the site's statistics were the following:
Torrents: 2,675,120
Releases: 1,091,055
Artists: 885,556
"Perfect" FLACs: 892,015
That is over 2.6 million torrents from almost 900,000 artists. Not only were the torrents available, the userbase was highly dedicated to maintain the library completely organized and with as much information as possible. Over the years options such as 'collages', 'similar artists' section and the development of tracker software itself (Gazelle) were what distinguished What.cd from other trackers and turning into the biggest private torrent tracker online. What is both surprising and amazing is the fact that all this was achieved through the collaboration of strangers worldwide. Even services such as Spotify or Apple Music would be hard pressed to provide such well catalogued archive of music as the one achieved by What.cd's users.
As one of those users I, too, feel the loss. The community around the tracker was amazing, the greatest community of music fans I've been a part of. Most likely in the near future another site will pop up that will try to replace What.cd, after all What.cd was founded on the day that Oink.cd went down, this might just be history repeating itself.
Are there any other steemians that were also whatters?
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/17/13669832/what-cd-music-torrent-website-shut-down
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/whatcd-admin-were-sad-to-say-the-site-is-not-coming-back