Last June, a Angel Olsenteaser video surfaced on her label Jagjaguwar’s YouTube channel. Looking for details about the enigmatic clip of Olsen in a tinsel wig, some listeners ran it through the song-recognition app Shazam. They discovered the synth-drenched track previewed was titled “Intern,” and that it was from an album called My Woman. The only problem: Olsen’s album wasn’t supposed to have been announced for a couple of weeks.
As with rival apps including SoundHound, Shazam has been available on smartphones for almost a decade now, but premature album unveilings like Olsen’s seem more common lately. Earlier this month, Shazaming a Perfume Geniusteaser brought word of an upcoming album, No Shape, that wasn’t formally announced until two weeks later. In January, the cover artwork for Father John Misty’s upcoming Pure Comedy was already visible on Shazam shortly before the official rollout. Last September, the album and song titles of the xx’s I See You could similarly be found on Shazam before they’d been revealed by the band. Others with art or information available on Shazam prior to a proper announcement over the last year include Animal Collective, Danny Brown, Dirty Projectors, Avalanches, Justice, Moby, Crystal Castles, and Warpaint.
This spate of Shazam-leaked publicity campaigns illustrates the sheer complexity of distributing music in a digital world. When a new album is on the way, a label’s distributor ensures the audio, metadata, and other details are provided to digital services ahead of the release date. All this data should be in the YouTube system, for instance, so that if something leaks, the label can quickly complete a takedown request. It’s during this several-week process that Shazam receives the info as well.
Part of the thinking behind having unreleased albums on Shazam is that once industry folks around the world start picking out singles, playing songs on the radio, or posting audio snippets, it’s helpful if listeners can learn what they’re hearing. “This gets messed up when you get really cute about trying to hold back the album title and making that part of the story,” Jagjaguwar founder Darius Van Arman acknowledges. And, as artists from Burial to Frank Ocean have long demonstrated, amid all the internet’s instant accessibility, a little elusiveness can go a long way. Secrecy sells.
But these Shazam leaks may have a positive side for artists and labels, too—so much so that some acts presumably “leak” their album announcements this way. “Sometimes it’s not accidental,” Van Arman says. “I think now when that happens it’s really intentional. It’s just a way to help people feel like they’ve discovered the information themselves.” Good luck finding a band who’ll admit their supposedly grassroots album-title discovery was Astroturfed, but it’s a reasonable hunch.
As for the Shazam spoiler of My Woman, Van Arman says it ended up being a happy accident. The abbreviated “Intern” video, and people finding out about Olsen’s hotly anticipated LP by Shazaming it, “performed as the album announcement in a viral way,” he notes. “I’d love to say we intended that. At the end of of the day it was a great result. The mysterious ‘Intern’ video was a breadcrumb to some news that people were excited to discover using Shazam.”
Shazam, for its part, doesn’t have much to say about the matter. “Each month, Shazam adds hundreds of thousands of songs to its catalog, which contains tens of millions of songs,” a company spokesperson tells Pitchfork in a statement. “We receive music from hundreds of partners from around the world and work closely with them. Occasionally, there can be miscommunications, and we work closely with our partners to minimize these.”
Given that vast amount of music released on a regular basis, seeing album information show up on Shazam or other digital services seems like it’s going to be par for the course for all but the most closely guarded releases. Don’t look for Drake or Beyoncé, say, to shrug off having their secrets aired anytime soon. Another silver lining, of course, is that the issue isn’t the leaking of full albums, as it was a few years ago, but just the premature publication of details about those albums.
“This is not something nefarious like there used to be that guy stealing all the CDs at the plant,” says Jon Romero, director of digital marketing for Vector Management, where the client roster has ranged from Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood, and Lyle Lovett to the B-52’s, the Strokes, Ke$ha, Kings of Leon, and Prophets of Rage. “This is more like a glitch in the matrix that’s bound to happen.”
For Van Arman, a glitch like this is worth the other advantages Shazam holds for labels. “Instead of getting this information about sales or whatever, which is hard to specify where it’s coming from, with Shazam a lot of it’s geo-targeted—very specific to a location or region to due to IP address,” he says. “It can give, very early on, labels a sense of where fans are for an artist.” Beyond that, by definition these are listeners whose interest was piqued enough to Shazam a song. A label could put billboards up in, say, Pittsburgh and people there might stream the record, but that doesn’t give an indication of whether the listeners are actually fans of the music, the way Shazam theoretically does.
And when absolutely necessary, labels and artists can still maintain an album’s mystique. After the Olsen album title emerged via Shazam, Jagjaguwar changed its practice. Now, when an record’s very existence must be kept secret, the label holds off from submitting the information to Shazam. “We were a little bit more deliberate about it,” Van Arman reflects. “When the Bon Iver record came out and we were always holding back the announcement of that, people were Shazaming it. It didn’t have the same result that happened when Angel Olsen was Shazamed.”
Don’t expect all artists, however, to be so circumspect. For those in more of an indie mold, an organic-feeling way of disseminating the news of a new album may be a feature of Shazam, not a bug. But for blockbuster acts, where huge amounts of money are at stake, leaks still sink ships.