On Tuesday Eminem’s new album Recovery started leaking across torrent sites way ahead of its 22nd June release date. The Eminem album is now spreading quickly, and data partner BigChampagne confirmed the veracity of early leak reports. That includes an early spotting on What.cd, and eventually a wider selection of other sites.
MGMT’s new album, Congratualtions found it’s way onto the file sharing ecosphere over the weekend, so in a striking move to make the best of a bad situation, Columbia and MGMT decided to put the whole thing up to stream for free on the band’s website:
Hey everybody, the album leaked, and we wanted you to be able to hear it from us. We wanted to offer it as a free download but that didn’t make sense to anyone but us.
Which is a pretty cool way of going about things, if you ask us. Bound to generate interest in the band and their music, and more of a gift to their fans than a capitulation to the pirates. Music has changed so drastically that bands are having to combat leaks and pirates in new ways, and we really hope this strategy pays off for the band. Go visit the site, get a t-shirt, buy the album in legit music stores, and stream it on Spotify, and let’s make sure they get their dues.
Music Ally has reported that over 445,000 people illegally downloaded the new U2 album. All these downloaded were alleged to happen between the 18th of February till the 3rd of March from BitTorrent sites.
The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.
The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.
Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.
