Idolator

On Monday night, a collection of songs purporting to be R. Kelly's 12 Play: Fourth Quarter showed up on a few of the leak blogs I read, prompting Vulture to send itself into a tizzy, and Digital Music News to cluck its tongue about the early release's effects on the biz. But 12P4Q doesn't even have a release date yet, and the blog where I first saw it, the kooky Music Is The Heart Of Our Soul, had a disclaimer that read "For your own information, this isn't the retail version just a compilation of tracks that might be on his album but it is still great to enjoy and to listen to." Which I think means that it's not really the official version of the album, but a bunch of tracks that were laying around the studio that happened to make it outside the Kells compound. Further confusing the whole picture are the torrent sites that had versions of the album marked "[RETAIL]" (which signifies that the version being traded is, in fact, the commercially available one) floating around their ether. So what gives? More »