On October 23rd, 2007, Oink's Pink Palace - described by its users as "one of the world's largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories" - had its doors closed. In that moment, one of OiNK's users set himself to the task of fixing the problem. Alone at his laptop, the man we'd come to know as WhatMan began work on moo.cd. Stock TBSource, purple categories, competing projects, humble beginnings. A series of fortunate events and a very short period of time later, WhatMan, nando and The N Man - shortly to be joined by A9 - began work on What.CD. On October 27th, 2007, this site was officially born.


Since its start as a reaction to what the online music world lost, What.CD has become a juggernaut within the torrenting community. We house over 1,475,000 torrents representing over 640,000 releases by over 517,000 artists. Weekly, our staff team puts in hundreds of hours of dedicated work for no reason greater than their love for this project. Our teams support the staff in countless ways both large and small, sharing the burden by developing new features, improving our forums, and more. Our community - second to none - has grown healthily from its small beginnings, and the tireless efforts of thousands of contributors ensure that this growth will remain unchecked. Our innovative interview system has remained open since its inception, founded on the belief that merit and knowledge are the best routes to participation. We are not just the world's largest private BitTorrent tracker. We're also the best.




We intend to celebrate the enormous achievement that is our fifth birthday. Over the next few days, we have a number of surprises in store for our community, so be sure to tune in regularly. As staff members, we view ourselves as servants to the project itself, and we know that your uploads, your creativity, and your participation make What.CD what it is. We'd like to offer a thank you to the users who have populated our halls with what is increasingly becoming the world's most perfect collection of music, and to the staffers and team members both present and past who have shouldered the responsibility necessary for keeping What.CD alive.


Today's offerings include a variety of new features developed by both the Developers and Build Team, our latest installment in the annual tradition of staff interviews, the first day of irredentia's ever-popular statistics feature, a special present for everyone, and a celebratory round of staff picks.


Happy birthday, Whatters!