While trawling my RSS feeds, I found a post from the interminably cheery MP3 blog Kevipod Music that was decidedly different in tone than the site’s other posts. A snippet: “Sorry for the inconvenience, this was not hacked by any way or was it stolen from kevipod. I know most of you are concerned. Kevipod will be tried to be restored.” Going to the blog revealed that the site had been stripped of its pop-starlet-filled banners, and the “sorry” post was the only one on the site–because the original Kevipod Music had been taken down by Blogger after one too many DMCA complaints^*. Which is probably not all that surprising, given the site’s penchant for linking to leaked copies of singles on ZShare and other third-party upload sites, but it still bummed out the 18-year-old Madrid resident, who took to another blog to plead his case:

WHAT HAPPENED? “Kevipod Music” recieved sometimes complains via emails from Blogger.com - i guess at request from the labels - about copyright songs. There were some songs i posted and i guess the labels saw them and contacted blogger to contact me to please remove them. They did warned that several complains would mean in a delete of the blog. And yesterday seems i got one more complain and so Blogger deleted the blog. I think i only recieved like 5 complains, and i don’t think that’s several, and I really didn’t think Blogger would actually do it but what’s done it’s done you know. This day would come someday and i knew it. Every music blog is destined to this i guess someday. When you get popular, labels have the EYE more on you and complain the more and stuff.

As it turned out, the complaint that caused Blogger to turn off the site yesterday apparently stemmed from Mr. Kevipod posting a link to a snippet of Mariah Carey’s new single, which is set to premiere–after many delays–today. Carey’s new album is on Universal Music Group-distributed Island Def Jam, and as we all know, Doug Morris does not take kindly to being the shmoo!

Although it’s pretty indicative of the ever-spiraling game of whack-a-mole taking place on the Internet that Kev was able to start another blog pretty much as soon as he realized that the first one was deleted, and subsequently squatted upon. But he’s lost the spring in his e-step:

THE FUTURE? As i’ve said i have lost my blogging spirit. If i get the old URL back, or begin fresh with this new one someday again the blog will get deleted. Because since this is a music blog and post music is my duty the same thing will happen again. Maybe a only MUSIC NEWS blog could be an option but not now. Maybe someday i’ll be back.

And so comes the end of another mini-chapter in the history of leak blogs–at least until one of the other sites in my RSS reader (like this guy) puts up the full MP3 of the song. (Chances are good that’ll happen by the time I hit “publish” on this post.)

Blogger Learns the Hard Way: Don’t Mess With Mariah’s Music [Sandra Rose News]
News [Kevipod Music]

^* The person who owns the site right now is actually squatting on the Blogspot URL, which is indicative of an amazing amount of hubris/dumbassery on the part of said squatter.