Photo by David Sampson
In view of last year’s celebrity nude photo scandal, the endless leaking of U.S. government documents, and the infamous Sony hacks, 2015 arrives at a time when the leaking of unauthorized content is neither surprising nor uncommon. If 2014 proved anything, it’s that the kind of piracy that has plagued the music industry for decades is a de facto part of wider culture—making the issue of how we protect our creative materials more political than ever.
While music piracy is decades old, the sense of entitlement that’s often coupled with hacking culture has seemingly reached new depths. Leaks are happening further upstream in the creative process; unmastered demos are making it into the public sphere not just before they are authorized, but before they are finished—so that whatever leaks is a rougher and rougher edit of whatever it will ultimately be—a song, a demo, an album. The insidiousness of this process is what recently inspired Madonna's comments that the leak of six songs from her Rebel Heart LP amounted to "artistic rape" and "a form of terrorism", and the same reason why websites like HasItLeaked.com attract over 1 million unique visitors a month. People in the spotlight are often betrayed by their private files; "privacy" is now more of a theoretical concept than reality.
All of this is even more confounding considering that leaking an unfinished song doesn’t really serve a practical purpose—no one is making money off rips, artists and labels are barely making any money off the finished songs. There’s no money in a hack. So why do it?
One reason might be because artists are trained to cater to leaks, which results in a positive feedback loop. In the fall of 2013, shortly after news hit that Arcade Fire's Reflektor had leaked following an early physical release in Ireland, the band tweeted out a link to a full stream of the entire thing. Arcade Fire had been planning a slow rollout, replete with cryptic public graffiti and brand partnership with Google, along with other album teasers that dropped slowly over the course of several weeks. This kind of extended PR campaign wasn’t the first of its kind, rather it mirrored the leak qua rollout of two other Grammy-nominated releases—Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories and Kanye West’s Yeezus.
In May of 2013, Daft Punk’s "top secret album" leaked when Twitter and Reddit users shared a WeTransfer link of Random Access Memories shortly before it was available on iTunes. The album had been teased at Coachella and on "SNL", with little information about how and when it would drop. Hours later, Chris Martins, who reported the leak for Spin, was apt to point out Daft Punk and iTunes’ swift hustle: "Neither the label nor the band has confirmed that [the leak] is the actual album, of course," wrote Martins, "But it so is. How do we know? Because the whole thing is streaming at iTunes right now." Two months later, Kanye West’s Yeezus leaked on file-sharing sites four days ahead of schedule, and Lady Gaga issued a "Pop Music Emergency" following the hack of her ARTPOP single "Applause", which was rush-released to radio stations and Apple's iTunes Store within the hour.
It’s possible that an album’s slow rollout makes artists more vulnerable to a hack—there are more eyes watching, more anticipation, greater hype, and more time for it to happen—but that’s not always true. Reflektor leaked on October 24, 2013. Exactly one year later, on October 24, 2014, Run the Jewels 2—which was named Album of the Year by this and countless other publications—dropped at 1:30 AM in response to an unauthorized leak. Unlike the aforementioned marquee pop acts, or Nicki Minaj (whose album The Pinkprint would leak in two months' time) there were no multimedia partnerships or street art expositions for RTJ2. In response to the unauthorized leak, both El-P and Killer Mike tweeted links to the entire album three days before its release. "#RunTheJewels 2 is here fuck that other leak!" Killer Mike wrote. A fan then asked about their free, early distribution: "Were you the original leak or was yours a middle finger to some asshole who did it immediately before you?" El-P confirmed swiftly: "We were not the original leak."
The immediacy of our reaction to file sharing of leaked information in the "Entertainment" world presents an interesting, inverse corollary to the role of file sharing of leaked information in the "Political" world. The Sony hacks of 2014 presented a rare occasion when the realms of art and politics collide—but there’s a critical difference between hacking in the name of "justice" and hacking in the name of "trolling". Wikileaks documents, video of Eric Garner’s killing, and other sensitive materials with real repercussions for humanity—content that actually matters—rarely had the power to instantaneously change the status quo when they leaked in 2014. These materials inspired outrage and initiated important dialogues (and rightly so), but owing to the bureaucratic realities of America’s political system, they did little by way of convicting a police officer that most of America deemed guilty, nor did they lead to swift policy reform.
And yet, a single act of file sharing in the "Entertainment" world can catalyze sweeping industry changes and renew efforts to protect entertainers from an increasingly hostile web environment—or at least that’s what happened in 2014. When a cache of nude celebrity photos leaked last year, lawsuits were brought against those who propagated the material, state legislators finally addressed the problem of non-consensual nude photo-sharing, and "revenge porn" was criminalized. When Donald Sterling betrayed himself as a racist, the NBA banned him for life. As news of Sony's hack-related injuries spread, New Regency and Fox scrapped their own North Korea–themed project Pyongyang (which would have featured Steve Carell and Gore Verbinkski), and Paramount barred theaters from screening the Kim Jong-il satire Team America in place of The Interview, whose distribution was initially canceled.
Meanwhile, leaked documents about the CIA’s targeting killing program, images of Mike Brown’s slain body, and countless other web-surfacing horrors of the last year made the general populace feel even more helpless to change "the system" that this material failed to indict. The irony here is that content that entertains often has greater quantifiable repercussions in its respective field than political material does in its respective realm. When a Daft Punk, Arcade Fire, or Kanye West album leaks, an entire industry moves to protect it, with a machinery of agents working to terminate illegal streams and promote authorized content all over the Internet. In the entertainment world, a single act of file sharing initiates a swift course of action; in the political world, it often makes reality seem hopelessly stuck.
Maybe this is why hackers approach artistic content with such entitlement: leaked information in the entertainment world has greater potential to provoke an instantaneous change than does leaked information in the political world, yet the risk of legal reprimand is significantly lower. If hacking is an act of vanity and exploitation, then entertainers like musicians are the most vulnerable prey. The turn from analog to digital recording and the widespread availability of mixing programs like Pro Tools means more artists are concentrating their creative materials in one place (on a computer), which ultimately makes them more vulnerable to hacks that target a single source. Labels have little control over the issue, as leaked demos often come directly from the artists' own archives. The result is a bit different from bootlegging that’s historically plagued the music industry, because people are bystepping the creative process with hacks—music used to leak; now it gets hacked before its finished. The latter gives civilians access to music that’s not just unauthorized, but incomplete. This is why Madonna claimed her recent Rebel Heart hack was so disturbing—not because what leaked was unauthorized, but that it came from an archive of unfinished, 6-month old demos that must’ve been "stolen long ago" without her knowing.
A bigger problem for music is that we’ve come to expect hacked content. Legislators have tried and failed to pass initiatives that would require search engines to strip out links to piracy sites, but SOPA—the Stop Online Piracy Act—was famously squashed by Google, Reddit, and countless other Internet titans who opposed it in the name of keeping the Internet censor-free. That was three years ago, and as 2014 turns the corner our rapacious consumption of these materials "in the name of keeping the Internet censor free" continues to make artists more vulnerable, as leaks are compounded by the media cycle and everyone’s "fear of missing out". One used to have to know where to look to find a leak on peer-to-peer file-sharing programs like Limewire or BitTorrent. Now, bloggers and social media propagate music leaks, and we consume them only to realize later that we’ve wasted our time on poor-quality cuts that gain a lot of traction in our wake while dissipating hype from the official release. Do we care enough about music quality to think that leaks are annoying, and at most, wrong? Its not really a "moral" question so much as a philosophical one: "Why do people want to destroy artistic process?", Madonna wrote in response to her recent hack. This is the crux of the issue, in the form of a question that 2015 has yet to answer.
Another terrifying aspect of hack culture is that no one really knows how to protect artists from this problem. The dozens of publicists I speak with over this issue all suggest that premature leaked demos are the new normal. As Claire Suddath summed up in a Time Magazine post five years ago: "These days, record labels don't worry if an album will leak; they worry about when and how." There are countless stories recounting the lengths that artists have gone to protect their creative materials, from Radiohead sending copies of Hail to the Thief to journalists in locked CD cases to Taylor Swift sending "Shake It Off" to its music video director on a locked iPod.
Privacy, moreover, might be the single most advantageous marketing strategy in this era of overexposure. Some of the most warmly-received albums of the last two years—Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled album, My Bloody Valentine’s mbv, Aphex Twin's Syro, and D’Angelo’s Black Messiah—all came out of nowhere, seemingly delivered unto the masses as whole, finished albums. The press advantages to these albums were huge and obvious—surprise albums make headlines and spur innovation. They also demand attention with an immediacy often lost in the course of a slow-reveal.
Secrecy, in these cases, gives artists space to create and the ordinance to time their album releases in accordance with cultural events that make them more powerful. Meanwhile, the public is gifted a singular, complete work—an increasingly rare and mythologized concept—that has more leverage against the detritus that seeps into a newsfeed over the course of several days. Beyoncé’s last album alone reinforced the idea of the album as a unit, setting the standard for "surprise" releases going forward while shattering a host of Billboard records and just generally "raising the bar". One year later, D’Angelo released a record with such a welcome, timely mission statement that it seemed preordained to succeed. A powerful ingenuity lies in the myths that artists keep secret. When hackers rob them of this opportunity, everyone misses out.