Leaks - Idolator

Posts Tagged “Leaks”

the law

Axl Rose Believes That The Truth Is Out There

Last week's leak of nine songs purporting to be from Guns N' Roses' eternally delayed Chinese Democracy had a whole mess of repercussions, but perhaps none of them were as unnerving for the proprietor of leak source Antiquiet.com as the visitors his office had yesterday—who happened to be from the FBI. (They even looked like Mulder and Scully! Talk about verisimilitude!) "It was kind of an ambush," Antiquiet proprietor and ex-Universal Music Group employee Skwerl told Rolling Stone. "When I came back from lunch they were waiting in the lobby for me." The three chatted for 15 minutes, then made plans to regroup back at Skwel's place at 7 the next morning. More »

7:00 PM on Tue Jun 24 2008
By Maura Johnston
1,239 views, 7 comments

Latest by JohnOO: "The FBI officials wanted to see the original files, but Skwerl erased them last week per instructions from Axl Rose's attorneys. Skwerl ultimately gave them second-hand files that are now widely available on the Internet." So, he downloaded the files in more »

naked begging

Guns N' Roses Fan So Desperate For New Material, He Resorts To Charity

The world has been waiting for new material from Axl Rose for a long time—even crummy, leaked versions of half-finished tracks haven't trickled out of the studio in months, and the clock counting down to the world no longer getting a free can of Dr Pepper thanks to his creative output is ticking. So one enterprising Guns N' Roses fan has decided to take matters into his own hands, as well as his wallet: "I am willing to pay $1,000.00 to charity if Guns N Roses, their management, or other 'interested parties,' provide me with a previously unleaked demo off of the band's long awaited Chinese Democracy album. It must be in it's entirety - and with Axl's vocals. I am will to pre-pay in advance via paypal." Thinking of giving it to charity was smart, since that "donation" can double as a sweet tax deduction! More »

3:45 PM on Wed Jun 11 2008
By Maura Johnston
1,093 views, 1 comment

Latest by n/a: I heard somewhere that GNR is eligible for induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. So, yeah. more »

leak of the weekend

Lil Wayne Album Leak Gives Mixtape DJ Opportunity To Hop On The Feud Train

Apparently the legal wrath of Cash Money Records parent company Universal Music Group isn't too much of a concern for South Carolina mixtape DJ Chuck T, who said that he was responsible for this weekend's leak of Lil Wayne's The Carter III as revenge for DJ-disparaging comments Weezy made to the mixtape-centric magazine Foundation. (When the mag asked him about the first mixtape DJ he enjoyed listening to, Lil Wayne replied "I don't remember the mixtape deejay—tell this dude who he talking to. I'm not into all that shit. I don't know no mixtape deejay. I am the originator.") Carter's release date is next Tuesday, so the likelihood of Chuck T being the sole source of the leak is, to put it mildly, a little low. But that didn't stop him from sending an e-mail blast inviting his fans to drink from Wayne's 192kbps milkshake. More »

8:55 AM on Mon Jun 2 2008
By Maura Johnston
1,735 views, 1 comment

Latest by n/a: The album is heat, aside from that corny Babyface track. It's nice to see a major rap record that's not micro-managed, nor afraid to be completely fucking weird. Plus, when was the last time an album had this more »

Speaking of Usher, some 555,000 people torrented "various incarnations" of Here I Stand between last Monday, when the album leaked in full, and Friday, according to BitTorrent statistics obtained by Digital Music News. And those numbers don't even include the many Rapidshare/Sendspace/Megaupload locations of the album, numbers that have probably put even more of a dent in the pre-release acquisition total since clicking on a link to some vaguely legal file-sharing site is way, way less bandwidth-taxing than the whole "steal and steal alike" setup that BitTorrent is based on. [Digital Music News]

Comment

MTV is reporting that the new Beck album may be stealth dropped, Raconteurs-style, sometime within the next month or so. The album would be the second Danger Mouse-produced album of 2008 to be rushed into release to avoid extended periods of leakage. (Sorry I made that sound more gross than necessary.) [MTV]

2 comments

Operation Shutdown

It would seem that the leak of Madonna's Hard Candy has succeeded in taking out most of the pop music leak blogs that linked to its Rapidshare-enabled downloads earlier today, i.e., most of the pop music leak blogs that weren't demolished by the great Mariah Carey blog purge of early 2008. For now, anyway—who knows where else this game of whack-a-mole can lead us? [Where Is Chris Pix?!?]

6 comments

Question

This month's two big record releases—Madonna's Hard Candy and Mariah Carey's E=MC²—were kept under super-secret lock and key by their record labels, but that didn't stop them from leaking approximately 10 days before they were scheduled to hit shelves, with both leaks being marked as the "retail" editions of the album. Somehow in my life I've never worked in a record store, so I'm wondering exactly why these retail editions have always seemed to show up at the same time on even the most protected albums. (Recall that even the Raconteurs record leaked, despite its much shorter lead time.) Wouldn't it make more sense to get the albums on store shelves as soon as the shipments arrive? Why is the music industry still so attached to the Tuesday release date, anyway? I realize that even in these hard times it's a large, lumbering beast, but you'd think that protecting a revenue stream would at least spur some sort of action. [Photo via Spojen?]

8 comments

paying it forward

Band To Downloaders: "If You're Going To Screw Us, At Least Do Something Nice For Someone Else"

Earlier this week, the new album by the Oakland band the Matches, A Band In Hope, leaked—more than a month before its release date. So frontman Shawn Harris has written a blog post detailing just how, exactly, people who download the album can make penance to his bandmates: "How may you make payment to the musicians who created it? Glad you wondered. When you download or rip the album, do something nice for a stranger. Give a dollar to one.org. Jumpstart a car. Give a rose to an old woman eating alone. Leave an open ended love letter in someone's shoe at the gym. But actually, those examples are not as great as the ones you will come up with! Take a video of it on your camera or cameraphone or if you don't have that, take a photo, or draw a picture, and send it to us." While I have no problem with the idea of bringing positivity to the world, the impish and Catholically indoctrinated sides of me are hoping that they get a cameraphone video of someone saying ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers within the week. [The Matches' blog via Buzzgrinder]

10:30 AM on Fri Feb 15 2008
By Maura Johnston
250 views, 6 comments

Latest by n/a: Who are these people anyway? Never heard of them. Give a dollar to one.org? Whatever for? To make Angelia Jolie rich? more »

shutdowns

Mariah Carey's Game Of Whack-A-Mole Continues

Following yesterday's closure of the pop-centric MP3 blog Kevipod Music, which happened because the site posted a link to a snippet of Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body," other sites hosted by Google's free-blogging service Blogspot, like ALi's Blog, have been subject to DMCA smackdowns as well, although with a little Googling you can see that sites that are independently hosted or on Wordpress.com have so far escaped Carey's label's wrath. More »

3:30 PM on Wed Feb 13 2008
By Maura Johnston
2,058 views, 9 comments

if your mother says she loves this record check it out dept.

Are Those Leaked Albums You Downloaded Really By Who They Claim To Be By?

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 »

12:25 PM on Mon Jan 7 2008
By mjohnston
1,879 views, 21 comments

Latest by n/a: i'm pretty sure they're responsible for the infamous "cider and cookies" that has been attributed to radiohead. more »

cliffs notes

"New York" Tries To Sum Up Music Leak Culture

If you've paid half-attention to the news cycle as regards illegal file sharing over the last 12 months, then you've already gleaned the gist of "Ripped To Shreds," where writer Adrienne Day interviews the founder of former BitTorrent hub OiNK, nameless members (and ex-members) of "ripping crews," small label owners, and journalists to outline the rise in online leak culture for a print readership that will presumably still be mildly shocked by the fact that "many of the saboteurs come from within the industry itself," that record labels and journalists and bands and friends of bands and nameless studio hands are all complicit, to one degree of malice or another, in putting records online for anyone to steal before they've been officially released. But here's a thumbnail. More »

12:05 PM on Wed Jan 2 2008
By jharv
890 views, 4 comments

Latest by worldsfair: personally i think personalized promos could be SO MUCH COOLER than folks (ouselves included) pull off... imagine if you got a Wu promo with the crew on every track specifically mentioning your name and what punishments they will pound on more »

you are being watched

Watermarked CDs Cause "Paranoia" To Be Added To Long List Of Music Critics' Problems

The forthcoming album by former next-blog-things Beirut, The Flying Cub Cup, leaked at the end of last month, weeks ahead of its October release date. The sorta-culprit? Music writer Erik Davis, who sold his watermarked copy of the CD to his local record shop; whoever bought the promo copy apparently decided to share his pre-release bounty with his friends and fellow OiNK dwellers. Davis felt pretty bad about the whole debacle—especially since his name's been sorta-sullied among the publicisterati as a result of all this—but his blog entry on the subject also gets into the idea of the watermarked release, and how said watermarking results in a curious spectre being hung over the already-beleaguered-enough profession of music writing: More »

1:34 PM on Mon Sep 10 2007
By mjohnston
1,778 views, 34 comments

Latest by Reidicus: @bedpan: Of course that's what I do when I happen to notice someone else's name besides mine on a CD. Good grief, what did you think I was saying? But you missed my point -- if I'm getting someone else's more »

leaks

50 Cent Flips Out About The Lack Of Curtisy Interscope Is Giving Him

Last night, 50 Cent's collaboration with Robin Thicke, "Follow My Lead," leaked to the Web, not even a week after 50's high-budget, high-cleavage clip for the Justin Timberlake/Timbaland track "Ayo Technology" was released. The video for "Follow" is another high-budget affair—Dustin Hoffman as a shrink?—and the song, which shows off 50's "sensitive" side, actually isn't that bad (at least on the Curtis curve). But according to MissInfo, when 50 found out the clip leaked, he went on an electronics-throwing binge at the G-Unit offices in New York: More »

8:47 AM on Fri Aug 10 2007
By mjohnston
2,857 views, 10 comments

Latest by gorillavsmarykate: I remember Amusement Park!!!! I was wondering how this was already going to be the third single. more »

magazines

We Want A "Leak Team" Of Our Own For Christmas

There are few people you can honestly say this of, and knowing the guy personally certainly puts me under suspicion for saying what I'm about to, but that doesn't change the fact that everything Douglas Wolk writes is worth reading. His book on James Brown's Live at the Apollo for the 33 1/3 series may be that line's best, and his new Reading Comics is generous, maniacally focused, and gives the impression of complete effortlessness. The same is true for Wolk's feature in the new Spin about the process by which major releases hit the Internet before they're available commercially. This is a complicated topic, but Wolk's organization is spotless, and he gets great quotes from pertinent parties—major label to indie, anonymous bloggers to much-leaked recording stars. If you want to wrap your head around "leak culture" and its effects, this is where to start. More »

3:25 PM on Wed Aug 1 2007
By mmatos
837 views, 16 comments

Latest by cassidy2099: I recall my sister downloading half of Limp Bizkit "Significant Other" more than a month before it came out, in 1999. more »

stopping leaks before they start

Record Label Actually Makes Smart Move Regarding Piracy

The Montreal indiepop outfit Stars' forthcoming album, In Our Bedroom After The War, may have atrocious cover art, but that fact probably wouldn't stop leak-happy downloaders from trying to snag the album from some enterprising member of the media who decided to share his pre-release copy with his friends. So the band and its label, Arts & Crafts, decided to pre-empt the OiNK faithful with a legit digital release yesterday—four days after the album's completion, and almost two and a half months before physical copies of the album will go on sale. From the band's official site: More »

1:20 PM on Wed Jul 11 2007
By mjohnston
1,775 views, 19 comments

Latest by n/a: I still think this is a great idea, but post the songs at like 96kbps formatted mp3's~ That was there is something there is something to be desired more »

fake leaks

This Is Not The Prince You're Looking For

A fake version of Prince's Planet Earth has been circling the Internet for the last week or so, most recently appearing on the Smoking Section; it's hard to tell who floated this copy out, but anyone who tries to play it will be treated to a batch of non-Prince tunes, including an opening dance-floor number called "When Will I Be Famous?" A few Google-lyric searches reveal that the album is most likely Push, the 1988 debut from British boy-band duo Bros. And it's just awful. More »

10:20 AM on Fri Jun 22 2007
By Brian Raftery
958 views, 5 comments

Latest by Raul23: NickEddy: That'd be Tool - 10,000 Days. Same thing happened to someone I know too. more »

public stoning, internet-style

Leakers' Names About To Be Leaked

The first post on Thou Shall Not Leak, a blog that went into our RSS readers right away for reasons that are about to become very obvious: More »

5:16 PM on Wed Jun 20 2007
By mjohnston
2,463 views, 22 comments

radio

Alt-Rock Radio Is In A Sort Of Icky Place Right Now

This week's Chicago Reader has an in-depth story on the Chicago radio station Q101, and its decision to play the forthcoming White Stripes album, Icky Thump, in its entirety a couple of weeks back. It's an interesting read for a lot of reasons—we find out that the album was transmitted via YouSendIt to Spike, the Q101 music director, who "doesn't believe in file sharing," among other things. But the biggest hook of the story to us is the sad-sack depiction of radio—the medium that, for the longest time, has been used to setting taste agendas but has now been reduced to supporting-player status because of its place in the industry and the wild-west nature of the Internet: More »

4:13 PM on Fri Jun 15 2007
By mjohnston
1,051 views, 3 comments

Latest by Mike Barthel: But Hinder's so expensive! more »

"Rough"-ing It In East Africa

Posts Tagged “Leaks”