valadiléne

Unfortunately Techloid.com has recently closed, so I’m mirroring their interview with vgmTorrents creator (i.e. me) here.

Interview with vgmTorrents creator

Ahh, Italy. Home to Ferrari, Valentino, the Renaissance, The Mafia, Pizza, Leonardo da Vinci, Enrico Fermi and many beautiful women!

But that’s not all. Italy is also home to Rosario, a game developer who lives and works there. Rosario is the creator of vgmTorrents, a private video game music tracker. After discovering his how-to on building a torrent tracker, we exchanged emails and sent him a bunch of questions on vgmTorrents, video game music, The Pirate Bay and the future of torrents and file-sharing:

TECHLOID: Howdy, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, what you do, some of the basics?

vgmTorrents: I’m Rosario and I live and work in Italy as a game developer. I’ve always been interested in computers and programming since I was a kid, and eventually this has become a job. Now I’m currently working as a freelancer with a friend of mine on our own indie game. I’ve always loved music and videogames, although only in relatively recent times I’ve discovered my passion for video game music.

I’m into web development (and recently blogging) as well, I love the idea behind BitTorrent and private trackers and I’ve always liked building communities, so I thought it would’ve been cool to mix all those things into a personal project.

TL: How long have you been messing about with BitTorrent, what go you interested in BT?

VGMT: I think the first time I ever tried to download a torrent was something like five or six years ago, when I still used a dial-up connection. I’ve always shared files since I had a modem, but being really young at that time, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on, you know, technically speaking.

Even now, when ideas about vgmTorrents started popping out in my mind, I didn’t know that much about BitTorrent, I was just an avid downloader but nothing more.

What really motivated me, on top of my passion for video game music, was the fact that I actually started discovering VGM and listening to it regularly thanks to file sharing. If it wasn’t for P2P, I would never have known about game composers and soundtracks at all. So that’s the main reason that inspired me in building my own tracker. The work on it took more than a month, in which I searched for information on the protocol, how things worked in terms of programming and so on. Also, in the meantime I became interested in the P2P scene reading news and watching stuff like Steal This Film.

TL: Okay, vgmTorrents, what is it and why?

VGMT: vgmTorrents is a private BitTorrent tracker which tries to collect any kind of content related to video game music. Soundtracks, rearrangements, remixes, fan made tribute albums, videos, documentaries, interviews, all of these can be uploaded on the site. I don’t exactly know if anyone except for me ever felt the need for this, I personally don’t know not even one VGM fan in real life, so it *must* be a niche, that’s for sure.

Anyway, the idea was to have a single place where anyone could upload not only the classic and well known soundtracks, but especially the rare stuff, such as rips of old games, western soundtracks which are often hard to find, high quality FLAC releases and so on. But, on top of that, what I really felt the site needed was a strong community built around it. In fact another reason why I decided to create vgmTorrents was that I wanted to meet people with my same interest in this kind of music. This is reflected by the structure of the site, for example the homepage is a blog with news from the VGM industry and P2P scene, which I don’t think is something you usually see on a torrent tracker. We also have a Features section with user-written articles and, of course, the forums, where you can introduce yourself, meet other VGM fans, or request a particular release.

TL: What’s your experience, thus far, running your own tracker, how do you feel about the legal issues and what are you doing to cover your ass (if anything?) Is it expensive, complicated? Do you use a third-party to host the setup?

VGMT: Actually, I never really thought about legal issues that much. I did a bit of research before I started working on the project, and I saw there are already some VGM sites around, but it looks like none of them have ever received not even a cease and desist letter or something. Also, have a quick look on eBay for soundtrack titles and you’ll find that 99% of them are pirated bootlegs, and you know, no one does anything for that, and I consider it to be the *real* piracy — so why should they even bother about a small torrent community?

On top of that, I don’t think this kind of activity would kill the industry at all, instead it can only help in spreading this kind of music even more. I don’t think a lot of people would buy a 30 USD worth soundtrack they have never heard before, coming from a store on the other side of the world, so, just like it happens for a lot of other stuff, file sharing actually helps artists in having their works heard by everyone. I’m sure that people who really like this music will eventually buy the real thing, and that’s why you can find a “Buy original CD” on each torrent page on the site. We also try to constantly talk and inform people about bootlegs, which, as I already said, are the real problem the industry should fight against, from my point of view. Nobody wins from that, except for -obviously- the bootleggers: the buyer gets a crappy and pirated copy of the CD thinking he has bought the real thing for a cheaper price, the companies lose all the money, and what’s worse is that you can’t do much to get your money back once you’ve been cheated.

TL: What about the vgm community on your site, is it mostly leechers or does everyone play their part? vgmTorrents is still young, what’s your growth looking like? What sort of stats can you provide?

VGMT: Of course most of the users come on the site searching for torrents on search engines, and a lot of them won’t seed after downloading (they will lose the ability to leech after they’ve reached a particular amount of downloaded data, though). But that’s obvious; I mean, I can’t pretend anyone to be interested in VGM and in regularly sharing it: the occasional leecher is okay as long as the ratio system detects it and kicks his/her ass! *laughs* Seriously speaking, of course I understand that not everybody out there is a VGM fanatic willing to share any single soundtrack, although it’s evident that seeding is important on small niche trackers like vgmTorrents.

Anyway, on the other side, I’ve been surprised seeing how many people have uploaded even rare stuff on the site. I uploadeded and seeded most of the torrents there, but we wouldn’t have 260+ torrents now if it wasn’t for those guys and gals, who of course are the same people posting on the forums and talking about their favourite composers and soundtracks.

TL: Are you aware of any other trackers or indexers that are focusing on video game music? Where do you want the site to be in less than a year from now?

VGMT: Actually at first I was like “hey, I’m sure there’s a VGM torrent community out there, I’m going to find it and register so I can meet some VGM people”. So I went on Google and tried a search, but I was surprised I couldn’t find anything similar to what I had in my mind… so in the end I just did it on my own.

Of course there are a few VGM sites I know, such as Galbadia Hotel and gamemp3s, the latter actually being a public tracker, but there isn’t a community there, and you can’t upload your stuff — it’s all managed by the sysops, so that’s obviously a completely different kind of website. As for GH, they’ve always had huge problems in terms of management and server bandwidth (they host plain HTTP downloads), also there have been a lot of cases of files containing viruses and malware, so you know, it just looks like people are not really happy with it.

As for my own tracker, I’d really like it if more people posted on the forums, I really love that aspect of the site and I’d be glad to see it growing in that direction. Also, it would be awesome to spread the word about unknown remixers and musicians rearranging game soundtracks, just like we already did recently for a Doom 2 music remake project. So if someone reading this is remixing or playing some VGM tune, we would be more than happy to feature their stuff and give them more visibility to video game music fans.

Finally, of course the main goal is to be the best place on the net where to find the newest and rarest VGM releases, and to be a cool way to meet new people with the same taste and interest in this genre.

TL: I’m not an avid gamer, or big into vgm (but I did like the music from Air Wolf for NES, as well as Mario Bros 1, it was cheesy and cheerful), is video game music really that hip that it deserves a dedicated tracker?

VGMT: I have to admit that when I was an avid gamer (now I spend most of my time working on games rather than playing them), starting with the PlayStation, I was already hooked on the celtic and folky tracks of games such as Chrono Cross, the creepy ambient stuff of Silent Hill and Parasite Eve, the inspired melody crafting in games such as Spyro the Dragon… and after all I realized I felt much more comfortable when playing something with music I liked as a background. It was an huge part of the gaming experience for me, and it became so important that at one point I started looking for game music MP3s on the Internet. It soon became an huge passion and I spent a lot of time listening to both soundtracks of old games I played when I was a kid and new releases, even from games I didn’t even know.

What’s cool about VGM is that it’s not only a part of those great experiences we all have when playing good games, but on top of that, out of the game it can still be great music, even as stand-alone. Also it’s not limited to a single genre, but instead it covers any kind of music, spanning from orchestral music to ambient, from jazz to metal, including most kinds of electronic genres and so on.

Video game music has become much more important than ever in the last decade — most composers, especially Japanese ones, are popular among videogamers and some of them have even successfully performed live in various parts of the world. So, after all, I think there really was a need for one dedicated place featuring this kind of stuff, as I’m sure there are a lot of fans out there that are willing to collect their favourite music and support the project.

TL: The selling of The Pirate Bay. Alot of their users had a cow and freaked out, especially because of the trust and belief in TPB and what they were doing (i.e., sticking it to The Man). At the same time, others were decent enough about it and understood their position. What are your thoughts?

VGMT: I was very surprised to see them selling out, but after all it was clear they didn’t have any other choice. As for the site, I always laughed thinking about how a legal file sharing site could be named “The Pirate Bay”! Seriously speaking, I just think we’re going to see it become yet another Napster and fading out into obscurity.

TL: Folks say that The Pirate Bay was responsible for a lot of the overall BitTorrent traffic. Assuming that the new TPB sinks, what’s the future of BitTorrent? Other trackers have stepped up like OpenBitTorrent and PublicBit Torrent. Is order returning to the BT universe? What about other p2p technologies?How do you feel about streaming music and movies? What would you like to see in the BT protocol?

VGMT: I think that the future of BitTorrent is pretty clear: for each tracker that gets closed, plenty of new ones pop up the day after. I guess it’s near to impossible for RIAA or whatever to shut down all of them. Nothing will stop people to do what they want, i.e. share stuff. As for OpenBitTorrent and similar projects, I think that it’s just what the scene needed, i.e. a public tracker not directly linked to an indexing site which is what causes most of legal issues, I guess. I’m not sure about video streaming sites such as MegaVideo or similar, I guess that from a legal point of view they’re easier to shut down because they’re actually hosting copyrighted data.

On the other side, as for the legal way of streaming, I think that web radios such as Pandora and Last.fm were pretty cool before they decided to restrict the services to certain areas and/or to let users pay. Are we supposed to pay monthly for a service that doesn’t play exactly what we really want to hear? The random radio thing was funny to discover new stuff, sometimes annoying because it randomly played unrelated tracks, mostly useless when looking for less known kinds of music (e.g. VGM!)… but now I think that paying for that is non-sense, and fortunately there’s been an huge reaction from the users against that. Of course my feeling is even worse towards all kinds of sites trying to sell DRM bloated crap.

TL: Finally, is there anything you’d like to say to the users of the internets?

VGMT: Maybe it’s trivial and it’s been said a lot yet, but I’d like to add that even if file sharing is really important and cool, I feel like people should care more about artists and support them if possible. Buy the CDs you actually like, go to live gigs and… please seed! *laughs*

TL: Thank you very much, Rosario and may the Force be with you!