The biggest music stories of last week felt like they were pulled straight out of last decade. Björk’s new album Vulnicura, announced on January 13, had leaked in full, two months before it was set to be released. Thus, a rush release to iTunes—a counterstrategy dating back more than a decade—to capitalize on the cresting wave of hype around what most critics are calling her best album since Vespertine. Then there was the revelation that the leaks from Madonna’s forthcoming album Rebel Heart—which had started circulating online late last year—had been tracked by the FBI and the Israeli police to one Adi Lederman, a 38-year-old Tel Aviv resident and former singing competition aspirant. Madonna’s federal and global investigation recalls nothing as much as the 2008 story of Kevin Cogill, a 27-year old Culver City, California man arrested by FBI agents for leaking nine songs from Chinese Democracy to his blog.
If you follow the data released by Nielsen, you’re well aware that music consumption is distinctly trending away from…well, consumption, with sales of digital files and CDs—the sources of leaks themselves—giving way to self-contained access points like Spotify and Pandora. Even though mp3s don’t trigger the fear and loathing they once did within the record business, last week’s leaks show that the compressed digital files are still capable of causing significant headaches. As for leaks themselves: in their current form as a technological byproduct of demand for music, they date back at least to Dylan: if there’s a strong enough desire to hear something, those with access will cobble together tools to free music from its private, pre-release circulation period, regardless of the artist’s or label’s wishes.
Over the past 20 years, pre-dating Napster and continuing well into the streaming moment, a history of the various rationales and reactions to digital leaks charts the history of the record business itself during its externally-imposed digital transition: tactics of copyright enforcement, technologies of circulation and surveillance, ad-hoc promotional strategies that have sedimented into business practice, and the alternately fraught and symbiotic relationships between music fans and the musicians themselves.
1993: As recounted in Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction, the earliest digital leaks happened well before any peer-to-peer software was even imagined, and only posed a conceptual threat to the record industry. "In late 1993, a panicked secretary strode into Warner vice president Jeff Gold’s office to deliver an urgent message: Depeche Mode’s new Songs of Faith and Devotion CD had just leaked to fans in online chat rooms!" Devotion was circulating not as mp3 files—as Jonathan Sterne notes in his book, "there was no such thing as an mp3" in 1993—but in the best-case scenario as larger, less-compressed "MPEG Layer-2" (if not .wav) files, which via the dial-up connections at the time would’ve each taken about a half-hour to download. These people really wanted to hear the new Depeche Mode, and it probably felt like nothing short of magic that they could get it through an AOL connection.
1997-1998: This was the moment when advanced digital compression, the fast Internet speeds of collegiate networks, and entrepreneurship dramatically ramped up the shapes and stakes of pre-release leaks. In June 1997, the RIAA filed its first lawsuit against illicit campus-linked FTP sites sharing Beatles, Alanis Morrissette, and Celine Dion songs via mp3—a codec that itself had leaked to the Internet from the research server of a university. That November, Sterne notes, an enterprising Hungarian fan ripped an advance cassette promo of U2’s Pop and uploaded it online, but it was the illicit circulation of a Madonna single that next January that drew much more attention. Scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day, the single "Frozen" leaked in January, after being recorded off a Singaporean radio station (the DJ’s voice was audible at the start of the track). In October 1998, the Clinton administration, working mostly in secret with representatives of the major entertainment and electronics conglomerates, rushed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act through Congress, setting the stage for a decade of lawsuits, safe harbor claims, and Digital Rights Management software wrecking laptops around the world.
2000: The year where the dam broke for pre-release leaks—Napster launched in March 1999, and over the next three years tens of millions of music fans eagerly (and by today’s standards, incredibly slowly) downloaded oft-mistagged, low-bitrate mp3 versions of new music to their hard drives, and shared what they’d ripped themselves with software like the WinAmp player. Then, Lars Ulrich became aware that a demo version of Metallica’s "I Disappear"—set for inclusion on the forthcoming Mission: Impossible 2 soundtrack—had found its way to radio stations. The leak was traced to Napster, and soon enough Metallica v. Napster, Inc. turned not only leaks but downloading as a practice and mp3s as a tool into a pitched battle between good and evil (one that Shawn Fanning was more than willing to fight). As for that actual demo? It’s become something of a mythic presence, belying the idea that infinitely duplicable digital files are simply around forever—those CD-Rs don’t last forever, after all. One guy claims this is it.
Metallica might have garnered the lion’s share of attention for their righteous crusade, but Radiohead’s Kid A was the leak that suggested a way forward (for a globally famous, critically adored band, that is). As the band made clear through their 1998 documentary Meeting People is Easy, which charted the OK Computer tour and their transition to global superstardom, they wanted absolutely nothing to do with the traditional press-driven hype cycle anymore. Thus, in the months before the release of the ridiculously anticipated Kid A, the band offered nothing to its label Capitol to promote the album—no video, no single, no press appearances, just silence. So Capitol got creative: they offered exclusive streams of the album to 1,000 select websites, and worked with the startup Aimster (yes, a program that merged AIM buddy lists with Napster and ICQ) for grassroots-style promotion. Within hours, the entire album had been re-routed to Napster, with fans matching the studio tracks to the live bootleg versions of the album that had been pieced together to match the announced tracklist. When Kid A debuted at Billboard’s #1 spot that September, it provided proof (for many of those paying attention) that just maybe, an advance leak didn’t have to be quite as calamitous as everyone assumed.
2001: Fittingly, the next major moment in mp3 leak lore came from the band that everyone was starting to call "the American Radiohead." Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s story was different from Kid A’s, though: instead of a staunch anti-publicity stance, Wilco simply made an album that its label Warner Bros. decided was unmarketable (a fact that, considering the much more art-damaged Kid A, makes Capitol look positively progressive in comparison). After the band severed their Warner relationship in June 2001 and the band became a rockist’s wet dream—their music was too challenging for The Machine to handle, quoth David Fricke in the great documentary that chronicles this whole mess—the entire album ended up online within weeks. Wilco had already scheduled a fall tour, assuming the album would be in stores by then. It wouldn’t be released (by Warner subsidiary Nonesuch) until April 2002, but the band had developed a stopgap solution that still works today: they streamed the entire album on their website, and worked with Apple for the first-ever MPEG-4 webcast. The Wilco drama not only introduced a generation of rock fans to the record business’ strange calculus of marketability and art, but marked the first moment since Dylan’s leak when an album leak became part of a record’s critical narrative. In his Pitchfork review of Foxtrot, Brent Sirota noted that his album review was either confirmation or denial of fans’ pre-determined opinions: "The long delay and streaming audio conspired to ensure that everyone in the world has already heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in part, if not in its entirety. Vast digital pre-circulation, corporate controversy, and buzz like a beard of bees have rendered all reviews afterthoughts at best."
2002-2003: A year after Ninth Circuit U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel issued an injunction against the service in July 2000, Napster closed up shop in mid-2001, seeking new investors and a re-launch. Pre-release leaks continued unabated, as new technologies—including BitTorrent, first released in July 2001—emerged and combined with increasing bandwidth, faster computer processing, and ever-cheaper and larger hard drives to expand the scope and predictability of illicit pre-market circulation. Despite some incredible security measures—no one at the label had a copy, and the music was only available via in-person listening sessions—The Eminem Show leaked in full in May 2002 to peer-to-peer networks (and via bootleg CDs sold on streetcorners), causing Interscope to move the release date up to accommodate demand—more or less, the same strategy Björk employed. To date, the album has sold more than 10 million copies in the US alone.
In April 2003, right as Radiohead (well over their Kid A-era aversion to industry machinations) launched a massive promotional campaign for Hail to the Thief, demo versions of the entire album leaked, a full 10 weeks before the album was set to be released. In a post to the band’s fansite At Ease, a pissed-off Jonny Greenwood explained what happened: "the leaked music is a stolen copy of early, unmixed edits and roughs—so we're kind of pissed off about it, to be honest." He then explained the difference between pre-release leaks and what amounted to a bootleg of unfinished work, which Thief’s leak was: "there's napster-style file sharing of released music…Then there's this—work we've not finished, being released in this sloppy way, ten weeks before the real version is even available. It doesn't even exist as a record yet."
Finally, earlier that same year, assuming that her forthcoming album American Life would leak, Madonna flooded the net with a fake mp3 leak. Upon downloading them, pirates would hear not the music, but a recording of Madonna herself, saying: ‘What the fuck do you think you're doing?’ (Now this is a leak I really wish was still around today). Eleven years later, RuPaul did the same thing, only better.
2004: After signing with Roc-A-Fella in 2002, Kanye West exceeded the relatively low expectations for his rap (not just production) aspirations with his 2003 post-car-accident mixtape Get Well Soon…, which featured "Through the Wire". It was the full-album leak of West’s long-simmering solo debut The College Dropout in mid-2003 that both cemented his Next Big Thing status among rap heads, though, and it was Kanye’s reaction to the leak, predictably, that was even more game-changing. Instead of merely pushing back the release date (initially slated for August 2003), West used the leak as the opportunity for self-critique, initiating an until-the-last-minute perfectionism that reappeared during Yeezus’s sessions as well. West re-worked several songs (amongst other changes, Lauryn Hill wouldn’t clear the "All Falls Down" sample from "Mystery of Iniquity" so Syleena Johnson was brought in to re-record it) and opted to scrap others completely (album track "Heavy Hitters" and the ODB collaboration "Keep the Receipt"). In 2006, Lupe Fiasco took the same approach toward the leak of his debut Food & Liquor.
2005: The drama surrounding The College Dropout was nothing compared to that of Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine. The album (co-produced with future West collaborator Jon Brion) was finished in May 2003, but was shelved—either because Epic or Apple herself weren’t satisfied with the work. As one enterprising fan started a campaign to Free Fiona, which included mailing foam apples to Epic, the full album leaked by the end of 2004. By March 2005, file-sharing monitor Big Champagne claimed that at any given moment, 38,000 fans were sharing songs from Machine, and music and tech publications alike were rushing to compare Apple’s situation to Wilco’s four years earlier. To further complicate matters, Apple herself decided to remake the album with Dr. Dre-affiliated producer Mike Elizondo during this whole kerfluffle. When that (pop-friendlier) version hit store shelves on October 1 (debuting at #7 on Billboard to boot), listeners who had the bootleg instantly noted that nine songs had been completely remade, two were unchanged, and "Parting Gift" was new. For many people, this was the first time they’d gotten a peek at the behind-the-scenes changes dictated by artistic and commercial considerations. Pitchfork’s Rob Mitchum reviewed both albums, clearly preferring the leaked Brion version to the official Epic release.
By mid-decade, it was often the case that an artist’s biggest fans tended to confuse their emotional connection to the work and a desire to share it independent of the artist’s own wishes. When Ryan Adams fansite moderators Robert Thomas and Jared Bowser uploaded tracks from Adams’ forthcoming LP Jacksonville City Nights in August, a month before its release date, Adams’ label Lost Highway—more specifically its parent organization Universal Music Group—sicced the FBI on the pair, charging them with felonies under the new Family Entertainment and Copyright Act (FECA), which had become law earlier that year. Thomas and Bowser faced 11 years but accepted house arrest and probation as part of a plea deal. "It was quite hard to listen to his music for awhile after the case. I had shut the board down while everything was happening, and wasn't sure if I was ever going to bring it back," Thomas told the LA Times in 2011. "After everything was resolved, I decided to bring the board back, as I missed the community that was created there."
2006: By this point, leaks had become an established part of the pre-release promotional process, with private torrent trackers like OiNK (which was busted the next October) serving as a clearinghouse for new albums fresh from the mastering plants (if not earlier). TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain was a different beast, however. The album predicted to turn the critical darlings of Williamsburg’s art-rock loft scene into bonafide stars (it was a co-release from 4AD and Interscope) leaked in February, a full five months before its July release. The leaked version had abysmal sound quality and downloaders had suspicions (later confirmed when the official version surfaced) that the files were mistagged. Chris Dahlen incorporated the leak as part of the album’s narrative in his Pitchfork review, comparing "Wolf Like Me" leading off the leaked version of the album (a signal of impending world domination) with the much moodier "I Was a Lover" on the official version. "Once you get used to the new setlist," he wrote, "the pacing is perfect as well."
It’s worth mentioning that one month later, the year’s other most anticipated album, Joanna Newsom’s Ys, also leaked, via someone hacking into Pitchfork’s own private, password-protected FTP server, used by the editorial staff to share promo copies with reviewers.
2007: If the most noteworthy leak reaction of the year was Jack White bitching out a Chicago radio station DJ in May about playing a copy of Icky Thump she’d gotten from a YouSendIt link, the most interesting leak story of the year (if not the decade), transpired between tiny Ba Da Bing Records and a single music writer. When Ba Da Bing owner Ben Goldberg was alerted to Beirut’s Flying Club Cup LP circulating via a peer-to-peer filesharing network, he leapt to action. He’d had the files sonically watermarked individual to each reviewer who received a promo copy, and the leak was traced back to writer Erik Davis (a fantastic journalist), who had just returned from Burning Man to find several voicemails from journalists seeking comment on why he’d leaked the album. Davis—who wrote a great blog post about the whole ordeal that you should read when you’re done here—quickly realized he’d chunked the CD in a box with other things he’d dropped off at a thrift store on his way out of town.
2008: When Bradford Cox, out of the kindness of his own heart, posts a link on Deerhunter’s blog to a free "Virtual 7''" on his MediaFire account in August, some anonymous jerk realizes that Cox has left this "cyberlocker" unlocked (by 2008, platforms like YouSendIt, MediaFire, and RapidShare were easily the most efficient and cost-effective way to globally circulate illicit mp3s). Instead of alerting Cox and being a good person, this anonymous goof posts links to other files that were also in Cox’s account on Radiohead’s fan forum/leak swap-meet At Ease. Among these files were unmastered versions of Weird Era Cont. (planned to be issued as a bonus for the already-leaked Microcastle) and demos of Atlas Sound’s Logos. Cox, always known to wear his heart on his super-long sleeve, promptly freaks the fuck out on his blog, which we all would have done, if we’re being honest.
Somehow, the Deerhunter drama was outdone that year by the insanity surrounding the (non)leak of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. Fans on AnCo’s messageboard Collected Animals had been sharing live versions of new songs for months, and after the album was officially announced in October, the countdown to the leak commenced—that messageboard, after all, had been an original site of the leak for 2007’s Strawberry Jam, causing Panda Bear, Avey Tare, and Geologist to cease all interaction with the board. The next few months were a carnival of hyperanticipation by fans for whom, as in the Adams case from 3 years earlier, publicizing a leak isn’t an ethical violation as much as a signifier of emotional connection. There were comedic legal performances, like when the Web Sheriff virtually roughed up Ed Droste, who’d posted a radio rip of "Brother Sport" on Grizzly Bear’s blog. In early December, there was the creation of a fake leak/RickRoll by a few geniuses on the ILX messageboard, that fooled many die-hard Animal Collective fans. Mark Richardson opened his January BNM review of the album by acknowledging the insanity: "Merriweather Post Pavilion…has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak." The whole story was crazy enough that some academic doofus actually wrote an entire peer-reviewed journal article about it.
2009: Despite his accidental (and innocent) role in the calamitous pre-release period for MPP, Ed Droste revealed in an interview about Grizzly Bear’s forthcoming Veckatimest the next February that he was more or less resigned to a new paradigm of illicit circulation. "Of course I'd love to sell a ton of records and chart and stuff. But realistically speaking, it's going to leak," he told Tom Breihan. Veckatimest would leak, "maybe five days after we mastered it," Droste told Amanda Petrusich that June, and his focus had switched to a concern shared by many artists—the "first impression" worry. "The biggest bummer for us was that we spent a lot of time and put a lot of effort into making sure that it's a really rich recording," he continued, "and then it leaked…and it sounded like an underwater YouTube stream or something. It was really, really bad. And so it's just a bummer to think of everyone's first impressions of this album being this horribly compressed, terrible-quality version of the album."
At least Grizzly Bear didn’t suffer the indignity of its label accidentally leaking the album itself, as happened when Universal Music Group’s Australian arm accidentally offered U2’s No Line on the Horizon for sale for a short time two weeks before it was due in stores, leading to the album’s instant global circulation. Luckily for them, U2 has never been involved in another freely distributed digital music controversy since.
2010-2011: With leaks a long-understood part of the promotional, mastering, and/or distribution cycles, it was understandable that huge artists would start to temper their reactions when the inevitable happened. On the eve of his breakthrough LP’s release, Drake reacted to the Thank Me Later leak with a June 2010 tweet that doubled as great PR and a testament to the realities of rap’s unique approach to the digital music economy. A year and a half later, when Take Care leaked a week early he issued a terser, but similar reaction. Earlier that same year when Beyoncé’s 4 leaked, she replied not by moving the date or tracking down the leakers, but, in true queenly fashion, by releasing an empathetic, prepared statement: "My music was leaked and while this is not how I wanted to present my new songs, I appreciate the positive response from my fans."
It was Beyoncé’s husband that same year who helped spearhead the decade’s most successful gambit to present new songs in the exact way that the artists themselves wanted, as the ultra-exorbitant, ridiculously anticipated Jay/Ye collaboration Watch the Throne sunk as much money into leak avoidance as it did bite-sized Otis Redding samples. Throne is significant for 21st century music in a few ways, but one of the most crucial is the production team’s John le Carré-style CIA operative tactics that actually worked to keep the music away from the public until it hit iTunes. Per Billboard, all recording sessions took place in private hotel rooms and all outside producers had to submit beats in person—no email, in other words. A journalist was booted from a July listening session after Tweeting about the music. The masters weren’t even sent to iTunes and CD manufacturing plants until days before their August release dates. Engineer Anthony Kilhoffer even traveled with the music on hard drives that could only be accessed by biometric fingerprint readers. The desire, a Roc Nation executive told Billboard, was to re-create the nostalgic (and wholly mythic, I’ll add) feeling of everyone listening to new music at the same time, combined with West’s irritation at exclusive listening-party guests leaking advance cuts from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a year earlier. So, there’s your solution to the leak problem, musicians: biometric fingerprint-readers on hard drives and flying producers to meet with you in person.
2012-today: For the rest of the world, album leaks are simply an established part of the game—as often as journalists report on another historic low sales mark for a particular week’s high-profile release, they’re dropping news bits about the next one appearing online for free weeks before its release. For the countless artists making music at their desk jobs, it’s pointless to try and engineer scarcity, because the more attention you draw to yourself, the more demand you gin up—what’s she trying to hide, exactly?!—and the likelihood you’re going to leak simply increases, via the easily-Googleable blogs that have taken the place of "Warez"-engineered private BitTorrent sites. Then again, obscurity has the exact same effect: take Jai Paul for example, one of the more elusive and promising young musicians of the past few years, just off the strength of two singles. When a Bandcamp page with tons of new Paul material surfaced in April 2013, fans and journalists alike were totally confused: was this a stunt release or a leak? Initial evidence pointed in both directions, until an official statement was released by XL a few days later: a bunch of his old, unfinished recordings had been stolen and uploaded.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s Jay-Z’s July 2013 followup to the masterful Throne anti-leak campaign, where he used corporate synergy with Samsung to engineer first-week platinum status by embedding a million copies of Magna Carta Holy Grail on Galaxy smartphones. A-Trakspoke for the world’s general impression of the one-percenter stunt, but the real revelation was the fact that the album leaked to mp3 nearly instantaneously, was loaded onto iPhones and blasted through aux cables at July 4 cookouts. The point was solidified: even when entrepreneurs and developers are making streaming music as readily available as a reliable cell or wi-fi signal through platforms like Spotify and Pandora, music fans still have the twinned desires of possession and customization, on their own terms. This is why people still bought records even though by the 1930s they could hear the same music freely on the radio, and it’s why people taped songs off the radio and traded dupes with friends instead of buying the records, once the technology advanced to a point that they could do so. And it’s why—setting ethics aside for a second—despite the mp3 waning as a music commodity, it still retains incredible value as a tool for circulating music, leeching off the exchange value of the digitized recording and accelerating the circulation process based not on economic factors, but pure desire.