Idolator

Last Friday an email showed up in Idolator's tip box from the folks at Urb with the subject header "NEw Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) track (?)," and it quickly got lost in the shuffle of the day's blogging. Turns out the track in question, a perfectly passable piece of French-style filter disco with the banal (if Valentine's-appropriate) title "Love," had apparently made its first appearance on the blog Headphone Sex very early that morning, the blog owner hinting that the song was left as a comment from a "TB" operating from "daftalive.com." Headphone Sex boldly went ahead and labeled it as "THOMAS BANGALTER - LOVE," and from there it didn't take long for the blog dominoes to start falling as they usually do, with half a dozen or so quickly reposting the track and tentatively crediting it to the Punker, as the mysterious "TB" sparked further rumors by dropping into the comments boxes of other blogs. Still, not everyone was as convinced, and enough naysayers finally prompted an early adopter at Trash Menagerie to go to the source and determine whether "Love" was true robot rock or not. More »

Surely anyone reading this who downloads music has fallen prey to a fake leak now and again, since it's not possible to inspect bum albums before you buy them the way one can with those high-end designer purses that mysteriously "fell off the back of a truck" before being sold on your less savory street corners. And oftentimes, those fakes are pretty easy to spot—take, for example, all the aspiring Vitamin Water moguls who labeled their freestyles with 50 Cent's name. But if a group of pranksters calling themselves the Overdub Tampering Committee are serious about their claims, it may turn out that even the most diehard fans have been duped into downloading phony copies of leaks now and again: More »

This summer's various Radiohead prank sites are all but forgotten in the wake of the unsightly blogosphere pants-messing over In Rainbows. But before "do a Radiohead" entered the modern lexicon and we all started wishing for a ball-peen to the digits before hearing the words "pay-what-you-will" ever again, there was radioheadlp7.com. The mysterious site featured a clock that portentously counted to Sept. 29, and it had Radiohead fans without day jobs waiting intently for some scrap of news on the new Radiohead LP. And when the big day rolled around, it revealed... a Rickroll. How we LOL'd! Then the site laid dormant—until now, when the hoaxmaster revealed himself as...a member of Oasis? More »