Just give me one thing I can play for.
Disco boys on bicycles.
So what if too many times we have been here, both
Poetic Retrospective
The Weather votes for Kelly Clarkson.Despite the numerous high profile lawsuits surrounding "illegal" file sharing, the new story for the pop culture-dictating 16-30 set is the simple fact that music is free and at the fingertips. Although the bread and butter of online music sharing is individual songs, there have always been ways to locate full albums. Lower-profile peer-to-peer networks such as Soulseek are saturated with the music obsessed, and facilitate a focused browsing for music, as opposed to the "single-track" oriented, and more popular outlets of Kazaa and Limewire.
Recently, MP3 and file sharing have changed the timeline of music marketing. Before an album is released, there is almost always a 1-3 month promotional period where the record is sent to journalists and radio. Like most media, it is this time period that allows articles to be featured slightly before or on cue with the release of a record. With the viral nature of the internet, it only takes a single person with access to a promotional cd to artificially bump up a record's release date, giving the entire networked world access to an as yet unpublished piece of music. This process is called Leaking, and is a phenomenon born entirely from technology.
In the past years, leaking has grown to such an extent, that the success of many albums is often determined before their release. In some cases, bands are tacitly complicit in the process. About a month ago, the new album from the popular indy rock group Broken Social Scene was leaked, a month before its release this Tuesday. Within a day after this circulation began, the band had a post on their website, almost announcing to their fans that they could now find the album if they looked for it. Was the band behind the leak in this case, or did they make the announcement in order to publicize this new proving period for music, one that takes place before people can open the shrinkwrap?
As someone with access to promotional CDs, its often fascinating to see the creative and unexpected ways that labels have been trying to prevent the leaking of albums; from encryption that supposedly writes a unique code within the music itself, traceable back to the leak source, to division of a 14 track CD into 100+ tracks to complicate transition to MP3, and even to personalized copies of albums with a soft whispering atop the whole work: "this is Sam Posner's copy of this album."
Most music is now recorded on computers, so the leaking of music can even happen before a work is finished. In some recent cases, such an event has caused whole albums to be re-recorded. Almost a year ago, Fiona Apple's new album leaked into computers everywhere before it was finished, and months before the predicted record release. Their was talk of Sony -- Apple's label -- shelving the project for good. But quietly, and behind the scenes, Apple re-recorded the entire record which will be officially released this Tuesday. Of course, this new version of Extraordinary Machine was still leaked a month ago.
Leaking extricates music from the packaging and art that usually surround it and further phases the physical distribution of music out of existence. At the same time, leaking seems to be another chapter in the Internet's trend of empowering the consumer. It gives listeners access to music before their minds are influenced by the opinions of the media. In many cases, professional journalists take cues from internet talk about leaked albums leading up to their release dates. It's both peculiar and somehow fascinating to think that someone with an internet connection might be able to tell Rolling Stone what to think.