Somewhere on the web is the ultimate music site. It has virtually every album, EP and single ever released in a variety of high-quality formats with insanely fast download speeds. You're probably not allowed in.
The Pirate Bay is dead. So is TorrentSpy, MiniNova, Suprnova and many other public BitTorrent trackers. But the most savvy and obsessive file hoarders don't care about that stuff; they wouldn't be caught dead using public trackers.
People serious about downloading pirated music, movies, TV shows, software and other media aren't interested in getting a letter from their ISP or the RIAA/IFPI/MPAA/CRIA. They're also not interested in getting viruses or fake files, often seeded on public trackers by copyright enforcers looking to make piracy annoying. So they've built up hundreds of private sites that only trusted users can access.
A private BitTorrent tracker is a site that you can only gain access to via an invite from a current user. Some of them are very basic, featuring merely a searchable list of torrents people have uploaded. Many feature forums with the trackers for people to announce and discuss files that are available. The most sophisticated feature gigantic databases that organize the files like the greatest online downloading store ever built, but with no checkout.
There are huge private trackers that, like The Pirate Bay, offer up everything and anything that you could want. But there are many more smaller, more specialized trackers. There are sites for music, for movies, for HD Blu-ray movie rips, for both Mac and PC software, for porn, for comic books, for console games, for anime, for TV shows, for E-books and for sporting events. If you know where to look, you can find a site that specializes in exactly what you care about downloading the most.
But downloading media isn't the only thing going on at these sites. At some, they're software development communities, with large numbers of developers donating time to building the site together into something more than just a place to grab files and leave. And it's just this sort of development that gives these sites the ability to reappear in different forms if they get shut down. Because, when you're in the illegal file-swapping business, getting busted is a fact of life.
The RIAA told me that while both public and private trackers are "enormously damaging," they've handed the reigns over to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) to go after these sites. This is probably because many of these sites are hosted overseas. The IFPI told me that "it focuses resources on the top of the illegal supply chain of music, regardless of whether that is a public tracker, private tracker or other source."
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